Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

About Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

An Indian/Hindu nationalist perspective on world affairs; as well as on technology and innovation; conversations with experts and with people just like you and me. rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com (https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Prof. Rajeev Srinivasan

Category

news · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Nov 2020

Latest episode

11 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

170 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Dancing with elephants and surviving: India in the world of generativeAI

   As the greatest investment bubble in economic history in happening right in front of our eyes, with the distinct possibility of a godawful bust in the not too distant future, and persistent memories of promising technologies that crashed and burned, it is necessary, and urgent, to consider how India should play this game of generativeAI now and into the future, whether that future is boom or bust for the technology. What adds criticality to this matter is the serious but hidden concern about three things: epistemology, values, and national security. The vacuuming up by Big Tech of Indian data gratis (hey, what happened to “data is the new oil”?) as well as the increasingly sophisticated manufacturing of narratives are at least as important as the threat to traditional knowledge systems that India has preserved more or less, under duress, for millennia. Is there a bubble? Irrational exuberance almost always ends up in grief, or at least that has been the experience in past cycles. We may be reminded of the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1634, as described in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wherein tulip bulbs were sold at enormous prices based on speculation about increasing value, which turned out to be baseless. Those of us with moderately long memories will also remember the 1999-era Internet bubble, where just having a web site and a cool online retail idea was enough to generate speculative investment. The net result was a huge bust, but there was a good outcome: the infrastructure left on the ground by bankrupt investors was useful in other ways in later iterations of the internet, which proved to actually generate value. But there indeed is irrational exuberance regarding generativeAI. The Wall Street Journal noted that Anthropic seems to believe its Total Addressable Market (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-expected-to-tell-investors-it-sees-over-30-trillion-in-potential-revenue-a611efea) (TAM) is an eye-watering $30 trillion. For comparison, that was roughly the US’ GDP in 2025. Goldman Sachs goes one step further: it estimated in July 2025 that the global TAM may be as much as $40 trillion. In any case, The Economist magazine estimates that the current generativeAI mania is the daddy of all speculative bubbles in western history (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/ai-revenues-are-growing-fast-but-not-fast-enough?utm_campaign=Singularity%20Monthly&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9n5mdE8N5oeJY4j2mWv2f1nqPkVox_MLqdvccKnmPan8Ca34EMXNAdC137y0rLBuFakosGPpWkm9QCeprMQGxzWnJJfd1mMlr2sZ43MPecK9JtMxA&_hsmi=432190659&utm_content=432010307&utm_source=hs_email), surpassing others in the last few centuries. The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be enough revenue and profits being generated to justify the literally trillions of dollars that are being ploughed into capital investment by the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta, i.e. US Big Tech. The Economist magazine, again. Sorry, folks, there does not seem to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The bottom line is that at least at the moment, there is a fair chance that there will be the mother of all busts from generativeAI. This is not investment advice, of course, but I’d say caveat emptor. The two potential business outcomes: the Linux way vs. the Windows way I am fundamentally an operating systems guy, having spent years working on UNIX internals at Bell Labs. I have observed how that market has evolved over the last forty years, and I believe there are good lessons to be learned from the experience. For, the OS is perhaps the most critical software on any machine, and strangely enough those who focused on it may have made either no money whatsoever, or lots of money. The “no money” category belongs to UNIX and its descendants, Linux, Android, Apple iOS etc. UNIX was developed at AT&T Bell Labs, and was given away for free to universities and other companies for complicated reasons having to do with AT&T’s status as a regulated monopoly. UNIX is now ubiquitous, running everything from data centers to smartphones to Internet servers through its progeny. Alas, AT&T made absolutely no money from it. I know this because I moved to Sun Microsystems from Bell Labs, and I was product manager for Sun’s UNIX OS Solaris. If I remember right, I suggested the name ‘Solaris’ in homage to Stanislav Lem. I was active in AT&T and Sun’s attempt to unify the slightly different variants of UNIX (HP-UX, IBM AIX, DEC Ultrix etc.) that had proliferated because experimentation and enhancements on especially the BSD (UC Berkeley) version of UNIX was very easy. We failed in this unification attempt in the “UNIX wars” of the late 1980s/early 1990s. The result was that UNIX lost a tremendous opportunity to be the desktop/laptop OS, because rival Microsoft was able to do disruptive innovation (see Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (https://store.hbr.org/product/the-innovator-s-dilemma-with-a-new-foreword-when-new-technologies-cause-great-firms-to-fail/10706)) and capture the customer base that these firms had earlier served through mainframes, mini-computers and engineering workstations. Before the mid 1990s, Microsoft Windows had relatively little market share. What is really interesting is that Microsoft then proceeded to “make lots of money”, the second business outcome alluded to above, by realizing that Windows was not just an OS, but a distribution channel for third-party applications. At Sun, I knew this too, but basically as hardware companies, Sun, IBM, etc. didn’t think much of the OS. Apple figured it out, and has made good money off the App Store. I make a direct analogy between the OS and LLMs. Both are core software in that they both have a clear impact on the hardware requirements, and that they are part of a stack in which many things can be written in layers above. In my opinion, the LLM, just like the OS, could possibly become either background noise (like UNIX/Linux) or the main thing (like Windows). It appears to me that Anthropic, OpenAI, the hyperscalers et al hope to make their own LLMs the inevitable choice (like Windows), whereas the Chinese are on the way to, intentionally or otherwise, making LLMs immaterial (like UNIX and descendants). This, incidentally, fits into the standard operating procedures of the respective countries: the US likes to use overwhelming force (the metaphor here is American football), whereas the Chinese use scale, overproduction, and crashing prices to destroy the competition. From India’s point of view, in either case, this dictates that pursuing foundational models is the wrong game to play. If American Big Tech wins, they become money-minting machines like Microsoft and Windows, and resistance is futile; if Chinese Tech wins, the foundational models become commodities. Therefore, the right place to compete would be on the layers above, that is vertical applications for real problems faced by real people. India could emulate a major Big Tech company that has taken a similar approach: Apple. Instead of jumping headlong into the LLM race, and spending billions like Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Meta (owner of Facebook and Whatsapp), Apple has preferred to stay on the sidelines, perhaps seeking out market niches or waiting for an LLM winner to emerge. There is a chance that Apple may emerge the victor, intact after the possible bloodbath. Sovereign AI and dancing with elephants What, then, does AI sovereignty mean for India? In my humble opinion, India needs to find the “white spaces” that neither G2 giants (i.e. the US and China) are attempting to occupy. Therefore, India should look at areas of the overall stack that are open to it, and which it can profitably involve itself in. Even though the most obvious thing that comes to mind when you talk about sovereign AI is a Made-in-India foundational model or LLM, that is overkill considering the enormous expense it would entail, literally in the billions of dollars. It’s also something that has been done already by both American and Chinese players, so there’s nothing novel about it. On the other hand, unique applications that take into account peculiarities in the Indian environment, and provide real value to Indian consumers/businesses may well be of considerable value. Once again, there is an analogy: the India Stack, which has not only provided us with the wildly successful UPI, but also ONDC, and various other applications, such as Account Aggregator, FASTag, UMANG, Government e-Marketplace. Here we have a stack that is building domain-specific applications atop a standard backbone, e.g., Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. That is where the value addition for India as a nation may come. One example, already explored by Sarvam AI, is that of multi-lingual capability. This could have a revolutionary impact on mother-tongue education, for instance if school textbooks are seamlessly translated by AI that would likely improve early-education comprehension. Just as the 10-year-old UPI, imagined for Indian conditions, has revolutionized payments, there surely are applications, most importantly in such areas as public health, jurisprudence, and governance, that will have a massive payback if implemented. Furthermore, there is the layer below, which is the hardware/computing infrastructure. Even though there are concerns about the availability of power and water, the fact that there is both less expensive skilled labor and increasing amounts of solar power, and the significant amount of opposition to them in developed nations, may well make India attractive to hyperscalars and others. Keeping a lot of Indian data on Indian soil is a good idea, too. Bonus: In case of a bust, all that infra will be available at big discounts. By the way, here’s a graphic I found on X, from an investor named Himanshu Sinha. He’s a little pessimistic, and his diagram shows the layers in the opposite direction from me, but it captures the entire stack concisely. The question, of course, is how well India can do in the applications layer and the “AI infrastructure” layers according to Sinha. It may be a question of glass half-full, but I believe India can play in the white spaces of applications and infrastructure. The goodies generativeAI may bring Every day brings new news about advances based on generativeAI: humanoid robots that can run as fast as Usain Bolt, Andrew Ng’s new plans to build a custom one-on-one tutoring system (https://x.com/AndrewYNg/status/2082199333920027009?s=20), and news of agentic AI escaping from its sandbox and roaming about unhindered, as in the case of OpenAI agents’ exploits on HuggingFace (https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface). Now comes the ‘proving’ of the Navier-Stokes (https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097374640582668336) equation by OpenAI, amidst allegations of IP theft from NYU/Anthropic researchers. There are clearly things to marvel at, but also to worry about. One of the big concerns is the massive hoovering up of Indian data by Big Tech, with neither compensation nor respect for copyright. This means both large-scale current financial, health and other data, but also the troves of Indian Knowledge Systems that may have precious, untapped knowledge in them. Big Tech is cavalier about knowledge, treating it as free for it to plunder. There was a recent story about how Anthropic was buying up old and rare books, cutting up their bindings, speed-scanning, and then pulping them (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/). We can expect similar treatment of Indian data. Similarly, the OpenAI habit of offering its products free to researchers, and then apparently monitoring what they did with them – which is the point of contention between them and Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) and Levent Alpoge (Anthropic) in the Navier-Stokes case – is also an interesting analogy with the classic “first hit for free”. You get my drift. Wait, there’s more: an allegation of straight IP theft by OpenAI in yet another case. (https://x.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996) As Goldfinger said memorably, “Twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. Then there was Jensen Huang of Nvidia posting that OpenAI has reached Artificial General Intelligence. (https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2096700264569090384) We certainly live in interesting times. Too interesting, perhaps. India has a lot to lose if genAI turns out to be the panacea its boosters claim it is, if India is not invested heavily enough. On the other hand, we have seen this movie before: unrestrained cheerleading for new technologies that disappointed (virtual reality, crypto currency etc). India needs to hedge its bets to ensure it can survive whichever version of reality finally materializes. 1970 words, Sept 9, 2026 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   5 Aug 2026

   Is there a uniquely Bharatiya management style? How compatible is it with the current global scenario?

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com (https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) If you interpret the term ‘management’ broadly, that is, to include not only the day to day running of companies, but also the bigger picture of governance, leadership, strategy, geoeconomics, and even civilizational survival, the clear answer is that there indeed is a unique Indian style of management. Whether it has been uniquely successful in the past is an open question, and given the ravages of invasion, one may be tempted to say it hasn’t been; similarly whether, or how, it is appropriate for today’s and tomorrow’s needs is another good question. But it is useful to identify what may in fact be the factors underlying such a style of management, and there are likely three reasons: civilizational, cultural, and practical. Civilizational The first is perhaps the idea of Bharatiya exceptionalism: that is to say that Bharat exemplifies a singular civilizational thread that goes back to the ancient four-fold Hindu idea of purusharthas: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. It is a holistic approach, perhaps most evident in the Bhagavad Gita, with its emphasis on ethical leadership and nishkama karma. It is certainly influenced by the topography and geography of the land, Jambudvipa, which has natural boundaries marking its extremities: Bharat, the land between the mountains and the sea. The climate and the rivers and the vegetation reflect a reality of natural abundance: what Rajiv Malhotra referred to when he spoke of the ‘religions of the forest’ versus ‘the religions of the desert’. Bharat, in general, had a tropical cornucopia of food, and perhaps that was reflected early in a certain tolerance for not only for other humans, but also for all life. It is notable that among all the lands that were populated early, Bharat was the one that retained its megafauna the best. All other human settlements saw the rapid extinction of large animals. Sustainability, a key mantra these days, was built into the Bharatiya outlook all along.

3. 

   13 Jul 2026

   Ep. 194: The Quad is dead; Long live the Quad!

   A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-old-quad-is-dying-time-for-a-new-quad-14030966.html (https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-old-quad-is-dying-time-for-a-new-quad-14030966.html) The Quad, a 2007 partnership broadly intended to contain China’s hegemonistic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, was a brainchild of then-Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. It makes sense: China is rampaging in its neighborhood, and gives every sign of wanting to either grab territory that belongs to others, or bully them into acquiescence and tributary status. The belligerence that created the current Chinese empire, that is the forced absorption of Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria into the core Han coastal heartland, is part of a harking back to ancient Chinese empires. Xi Jinping, perhaps even more than Mao, embodies a hankering to be the almighty King-Emperor of the erstwhile Middle Kingdom The US unwittingly allowed China to rapidly de-industrialize it post joining the WTO, and to come up with a business plan that calls for massive over-production and the resultant price collapse, which is a template they use to rape and pillage industry after industry. A recent casualty is Germany’s prized automobile industry: bellwether Volkswagen has been forced to lay off 100,000 workers, brutalized by a tsunami of Chinese electric vehicles. However, as Utpal Kumar points out in an insightful essay (https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-dictators-paradox-xi-jinpings-purges-betray-his-fear-14029741.html), all is not well in Xi’s kingdom: e.g., the debt mountain, paranoia as seen in regular purges of military brass, and propaganda that conceals all bad news (did you hear of a small plane hitting a tower in central Beijing? Yes, a mini-9/11. But the information was blanked out). Continuing rural poverty is also censored, although Indians on x.com posted images of extreme filth and poverty, far from the glossy high-rise, bullet-train image that Chinese propaganda projects. Paradoxically, that is precisely what makes China yet more dangerous: it will probably lash out in external adventurism to preserve legitimacy internally. Thus the need for sober containment of China’s destructive power. The US, which has been the natural candidate for reining in this rogue power, has now demonstrated that it is retrenching. It has, for instance, demonstrated that it is no longer willing to indefinitely support its NATO allies. The “nuclear umbrella” that it has offered Japan may also be getting a little threadbare. It is likely that President Trump invaded Iran with the good idea of denying China oil both Iranian and Venezuelan oil, as retaliation for China’s squeeze on rare earths. Alas, that has turned into a fiasco, creating collateral damage for innocent bystanders such as India. In game-theoretic terms, if an isolationist “Fortress America” mood has descended on the US, then a “G2 condominium (https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-a-us-china-condominium-dividing-up-the-world-between-themselves-12464262.html)” with China may be the simplest option, as I said several years ago. If the US has indeed acquiesced to China being the hegemon in its sphere of influence, namely the Indo-Pacific, then there is good reason for the jilted Quad members (Japan, Australia and India) to enter into bilateral agreements amongst each other to look after their own national interests, including but not limited to Sinophobia. And in fact they have done so. It is true that the Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting in May 2026 in Delhi produced some agreements on critical minerals (clearly a US priority) and surveillance collaboration, but I get the feeling that this is mostly a matter of keeping up appearances. Therefore it is worth pivoting to Japanese PM Takaichi’s recent visit to India, and PM Modi’s trips to Indonesia and Australia. Japan and India are obvious partners, because their economies are complementary: one is resource- and technology-rich, and labor-poor, and the other is the opposite. There is also an old civilizational link between the two, going back to Bodhidharma from Kanchipuram who embarked from Muziris circa 500CE and established the Zen school of Buddhism in Japan. There are also clear civilizational links between India and Indonesia. Hindu Bali is obvious; but Java, until the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit Empire was defeated circa 1500CE by Muslim kingdoms (encouraged by the Chinese empire of the time), was also heavily Indianized. As someone who has traveled in both Japan and Indonesia, I was delighted to see Devanagari inscriptions on the Great Bell at Hiroshima, and the Ramayana Ballet at Prambanan temple. विपुलप्रभ अतुल्यनन्त नाथ दिशि विदिशि स्फुरि सर्वबुद्धक्षेत्रा। राग प्रशमि सर्वदोषमोहां नरकगतिस्मि प्रशामि धूमकेतुम्॥१५॥ "The lord of vast light, incomparable and infinite, has illuminated all Buddha countries in all the quarters; he has quieted passions, all sins and errors; he has quieted the fire in the walk of hell." This is the inscription on the Great Bell in Hiroshima. Japan and India signed a series of agreements, including an investment target of Yen 10 trillion (about $66 billion) in areas such as critical minerals, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. They agreed upon a new focus on Artificial Intelligence and quantum technologies and in energy self-reliance, including hydrogen and biogas. They also reaffirmed support for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (let us note that on June 16th the US renamed its Indo-Pacific Command to just “Pacific Command”, a telling admission of retreat. The US may well be abandoning the Indian Ocean just when it is becoming the focus of trade.) The Indonesia-India agreements were significant: they included, for instance, Brahmos and Astra missile systems (which, in conjunction with other ASEAN purchases of Brahmos missiles, creates a potentially integrated sea-denial mechanism against persistent Chinese maritime aggression). Pointedly, there will be joint development on Indonesia’s deep-water Sabang Port in Aceh, which is on the Malacca Straits just 90 nautical miles away from India’s upcoming Great Nicobar dual-use port. The two ports can form a defensive shield that could deny transit in Malacca to hostile ships and submarines (read Chinese). Since two-thirds of China’s trade and energy imports pass through Malacca, this is a potent threat, especially as we have just seen what the siege of Hormuz did to global trade. Let us also remember that, exactly 1,001 years ago, Emperor Rajendra Chola sent a large fleet to open up Malacca when the SriVijaya Empire closed it. There were also agreements on critical minerals (e.g. nickel for EV batteries, as Indonesia has the world’s largest reserves, cobalt, etc.), steel, maritime security, and technology cooperation. Let us also remember the trilateral Japan-Indonesia-India naval exercises in the Andaman Sea in February 2026. PM Modi’s visit to Australia is the most problematic. Earlier, under Kevin Rudd, a Sinophilic PM, Australia exited the Quad in 2008, effectively making it moribund. Besides, Australia for decades refused sniffily to sell India uranium, despite India being a committed non-proliferator. This may also have had something to do with the UK’s (Whitehall’s) deleterious influence on Australia. But days ago, Australia committed to supplying uranium to India, in support of the latter’s quest for energy security. Oz has apparently learned that cozying up to China is not good for its own economic health. Thus, the quadrilateral of US, Japan, Australia and India may well morph into a quadrilateral of Japan, Indonesia, Australia and India, all united in their concerns about China. The US has a choice: either continue to be the anchor of the Quad (Pentagon?), or be left behind if it insists on retreating into its shell. The former option would be better for all concerned. 1150 words, 11 July 2026 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

Who has been a guest on Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

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• Elon Musk
• Keir Starmer
• Rajiv Narayanan
• Jake Sullivan
• Mark Zuckerberg

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