Two years ago, I packed up a life and moved.
Howrah to Newtown. It sounds simple when you say it like that. A change of address. But anyone who has left a neighbourhood they have known for years will tell you what that sentence actually means. It means saying goodbye to the familiar disorder of streets you navigated by instinct. The corner chai stall that knew your order. The weight of years settled into walls and lanes and faces.
Newtown was clean. Planned. Wide roads, new buildings, a silence I had not asked for. And for a while, you quietly wonder if you made the right call.
Then, slowly, a society begins to reveal itself. Faces at the elevator become names. Names become conversations. And conversations, over two years of festivals and casual evenings and the ordinary overlaps of life in shared spaces, become something you did not expect to find so quickly.
They become people.
Niladri and Mohita were among the first.
So when March brought a phone call with an invite – a destination birthday at Mandarmani, 10th of May, their daughter Trishika turning one – it was not really a decision. It was a date to mark in the calendar.
Six families from the society. Niladri had booked a Force Traveller for the group. We went in our own car because we travel with Rocky, our cat, who has strong opinions about shared transport, and we have learned not to argue with him.
My wife Sushma and my son Neel shared the wheel, fifty-fifty.
We started on a Sunday morning. The usual Kolkata traffic held us till Kolaghat, where we stopped at Anand restaurant, just opposite the iconic Sher-E-Punjab. There is something about a highway break and a plate of aloo parathas with omelette that feels disproportionately satisfying. The city falls away. The body relaxes. You remember that you are, in fact, going somewhere.
We reached Mandarmani ahead of the Force Traveller. A stop along the way for tender coconut. Less than two and a half hours in total. The sea was already visible when we checked in at Aqua Marina Drive Inn.
Lunch was the kind that ruins you for ordinary food for a few days. Fish so fresh it tasted like the sea had let it go reluctantly. Mutton that had been given the time it deserved, falling apart, deeply flavoured, exactly right. Desserts that made the table go briefly quiet.
After that, I did what any sensible person does after a meal like that. I went to my room, stretched out, and watched IPL while the rest of the group claimed the swimming pool with the enthusiasm of people who had earned it. My daughter and Neel were in their elements. The children were in theirs. No regrets on my end.
Then came the photographers. Two, maybe three hours of shooting. Families arranged and rearranged. The children endured it with varying degrees of patience. Little Trishika, the birthday girl herself, sat on the grass in her colourful dress looking at the world with the serene curiosity of someone entirely unbothered by the occasion being thrown in her honour.
She had no idea what was coming.
The cake cutting was on the beach itself.
If you look at the photograph from that night, you will understand why I use the words “out of this world.” A red carpet laid on the sand, lined with fairy lights on both sides. The entire group assembled in the dark. The ocean somewhere behind them, invisible but present, the sound of it underneath everything. Niladri and Mohita in the centre with Trishika, dressed in red, the word ONE glowing in front of them.
It was the kind of scene that makes you feel the occasion even if you are standing at the edges of it.
But Trishika had reached her limit.
One year old, in a gorgeous dress, on a beach, under lights, surrounded by twenty-five people pointing cameras at her. She had cooperated for as long as any reasonable one-year-old could be expected to cooperate. And so she made her decision, as all honest people eventually do.
She ate the cake.
Not symbolically. Not in the polite, ceremonial way. She committed. While the adults orchestrated and the photographers angled and everyone waited for the perfect moment, Trishika simply kept eating with the unbothered focus of someone who had correctly identified the only thing on the beach that mattered.
It was the funniest and truest moment of the entire weekend.
The party after was everything a good night should be. Fabulous food. Laughter that built on itself. Conversations that started with politics, wandered into life, touched on spirituality, and landed somewhere past eleven at the conclusion that life is ultimately a maya. Which is either very deep or very funny at that hour. Probably both.
We got back to our rooms close to midnight. I turned on the TV in time for the final few deliveries of MI versus RCB. RCB won on the last ball. The kind of finish that felt almost scripted, as if even cricket had decided to match the mood of the evening.
Next morning, breakfast, goodbyes that were not quite goodbyes, and then the drive back.
We stopped at Sher-E-Punjab on the return, the full circle of it pleasing in the way small symmetries always are. And somewhere on that highway, with the weekend behind us and home still a couple of hours ahead, Neel decided that time was a suggestion. There was a particular stretch where the overtaking got a little too adventurous for my comfort.
I gave him a good mouthful. He is my son. He took it well. That too is the mark of something, though I am not sure it is a virtue.
We were home by four.
I have lived in Newtown for two years now. The roads are still cleaner than anything I grew up with. The silence is something I have made a kind of peace with. But what I did not anticipate, and what two years have quietly delivered, is this: people who will plan a beach birthday for a one-year-old with fairy lights and a red carpet on the sand, who will debate the nature of existence past midnight, who will fill a Force Traveller and drive three hours just to celebrate together.
That is not something a new society owes you. That is something you have to be lucky enough to find.
The photographs from that night will stay with me. The one of my family on the beach – the four of us, the sea behind, the sand under our feet. The one of Neel and his sister flexing at the water’s edge, twenty-one and boundless and not a care in the world. The red carpet and the fairy lights and twenty-five people standing in the dark around a little girl who just wanted her cake.
We were lucky. We are lucky.
Happy birthday, Trishika. May every year bring you more of what matters. And may you always, always go for the cake.
Let me be honest with you upfront. I am going to talk about this current macro moment from multiple seats at the table simultaneously. As a founder whose company earns in dollars and pays in rupees. As an active equity investor in listed Indian companies. And as an ordinary resident of this country who fills petrol, buys groceries, and watches his household costs move.
These are not comfortable positions to hold together right now. But that is exactly why the conversation is worth having.
When a head of government stands up and asks citizens to stop buying gold for a year, skip foreign vacations, work from home, and carpool, read it as a policy signal, not a lifestyle suggestion. Heads of government do not make those specific requests unless the situation behind the numbers is materially worse than the numbers suggest.
The transmission chain runs from a disrupted waterway to your fuel pump and your grocery bill, and most of it is already in motion. India imports about 85 percent of its oil. A large share of that transits through a corridor that has been severely disrupted since late February. Crude that was comfortable in the $70-80 range is now sitting above $100 and has stayed there. That has widened India’s current account deficit, put sustained selling pressure on the rupee and forced the RBI to burn through reserves at a pace that is now showing up in the weekly data.
The rupee started 2026 at around 89.86 to the dollar. It has crossed 95 this week. That is a depreciation of around 6 percent in under five months. Measured in absolute rupee terms, every dollar now costs you six rupees more than it did on January 1. That may not sound dramatic in percentage terms. In a thin-margin business that imports anything, or a household that runs on LPG and petrol, it adds up fast.
The PM’s appeal is the public-facing signal that the policy stack has escalated. Market intervention came first. Then restrictions on speculative currency positions. Then discussions around hedging rule changes for importers. The citizen-facing appeal is the next step. After that comes formal administrative action: import curbs, higher duties, and potentially restrictions on outward remittances. We were not there yet when the PM spoke on Sunday. But the gap between not there yet and there closed faster than I expected.
As I was finishing this piece, the government issued two official orders raising import tariffs on gold and silver from 6 percent to 15 percent overnight, more than doubling them, through a combination of a 10 percent basic customs duty and a 5 percent agriculture infrastructure and development levy. Sunday was the speech. Tuesday was the gazette. That is how quickly this policy stack moves when the pressure is on. The sequence I described above is not a forecast anymore. It is a live event.
Oil staying above $100 is not an abstract macroeconomic number. It is the thing that decides whether the government raises fuel prices at the pump, which it has so far avoided doing but may not be able to avoid much longer. When petrol and diesel prices rise, freight costs rise. When freight costs rise, every product that moves on a truck gets more expensive. Food. Medicine. Building materials. Consumer goods.
LPG is a more direct pinch. India imports a significant share of its LPG through the same disrupted corridor. Subsidised cylinders have kept the headline price manageable for now, but that subsidy cost shows up in the fiscal deficit, which eventually surfaces as reduced government spending elsewhere or as inflation through other channels.
This is not something that affects only certain people. A weaker rupee and higher energy costs compress household budgets across the board. The salaried professional, the small trader, the farmer waiting on fertiliser whose input costs have risen because urea imports face the same supply chain pressure. The pain is distributed, even if unevenly.
Anyone who frames this as a crisis for some and an opportunity for others without saying this first is not giving you the full picture. I am not going to do that.
The market has been falling. My instinct, shaped by months of screening listed companies with a focus on management quality and early-stage entry, is that falling markets in the context of solvable external shocks are where the genuinely interesting entries appear.
This is not 1991. India’s foreign exchange reserves, even after the recent drawdown, cover over 10 months of imports. The 1991 crisis happened with roughly three weeks of import cover. The financial system, the export base, the services surplus, none of these existed at that scale back then. Calling this a balance of payments crisis is rhetorically powerful and analytically wrong. What we are watching is a stress test.
In stress tests, the businesses with strong balance sheets, low dollar-denominated debt, and domestic pricing power tend to come out relatively better than the market’s initial reaction prices in. That is where I am hunting right now. Not chasing recovery trades. Not timing oil. Screening for businesses where the price has fallen because the index has fallen, not because the underlying business logic has changed.
The sectors worth examining with fresh eyes are those with either export revenue or genuine domestic pricing power. The ones I would stay cautious on are import-dependent businesses with dollar-denominated input costs and limited ability to pass through higher costs. Aviation is getting squeezed on both sides. Consumer electronics retail faces potential import curb risk. IT services, on the other hand, sit in a cross-current that is net positive for margins in the near term. Dollar revenues converting at 95 instead of 90 is meaningful margin expansion without a single additional unit of work being done.
The opportunity is real. The discipline required to act without over-concentrating or mistiming is equally real.
Brainium is a 13-year-old software and AI engineering company. We earn in dollars from clients in the USA, UK and elsewhere. We pay everyone here in rupees. We do not hedge. We are too small for that to make practical sense, so we live with the volatility directly.
The current rupee level improves our operating economics. A dollar that converted at 90 now converts at 95. On a healthy project margin, that spread is material. I will not pretend otherwise.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to. The same inflation compressing household budgets for most people is also raising our operating costs here. Salaries move with inflation over time. Office costs, travel, everything priced in rupees gets more expensive as the general price level rises. The tailwind from rupee depreciation is real but it is not free money. It comes with a cost side that catches up. And more fundamentally, I live in this economy too. When the grocery bill rises for my team, that is not an abstraction.
What I am doing with the current environment is treating it as a prompt to accelerate, not to sit back. The window to close pending engagements, bring in new dollar-denominated work, and build products for sectors that need efficiency tools as their margins tighten, that window is open now. Acting in that window is the job.
Yes, you read that right.
I am currently building Project Aurum, an agentic AI middleware product designed specifically for jewellery retail in India. And since Sunday’s speech, and now overnight’s customs duty hike that more than doubled gold import tariffs from 6 percent to 15 percent in a single gazette notification, the most common reaction I have been getting is some version of: worst possible timing, Sourav.
I want to push back on that.
Here is what the duty hike actually does to the organised jewellery retail sector. It raises the landed cost of gold significantly. That gets passed through to the consumer as higher sticker prices. Higher sticker prices compress discretionary purchase volumes in the near term. Margins get squeezed from both the cost side and the demand side simultaneously. The retailer who was already running a complex operation just had that complexity dialled up by the government in a single night.
That is not an argument against building Aurum. That is the argument for building Aurum faster.
Because here is the more important point. Aurum is not a bet on gold sentiment. It never was. It is a bet on the operational complexity of running a mid-sized jewellery business in India, and that complexity is completely independent of whether consumers are buying more or less gold this quarter.
Think about what a jewellery retailer actually deals with. Thousands of SKUs with constantly fluctuating gold rates baked into pricing. Catalogue management that is either manual or broken. Design-to-sale workflows that have not been modernised in a decade. Inventory that sits across multiple showrooms with no unified intelligence layer. Sales staff who are working off instinct rather than data. None of that changes because the PM gave a speech or the finance ministry moved a duty rate overnight. What changes is the urgency with which a CFO picks up the phone to talk about efficiency. That urgency is my friend.
A mid-market regional jewellery chain watching their footfall soften, their input costs jump, and their operating margins compress from both ends, that business needs what Aurum is building more in a difficult quarter than in a comfortable one. The best time to sell a torch is when the lights go out. I am building the torch.
Contrarian bets are only contrarian until they are obvious. The macro environment has just handed me a room full of people who now have a concrete, government-mandated reason to feel the pain that Aurum is designed to solve. I intend to walk into that room.
The RBI releases weekly foreign exchange reserve data every Friday. Watch the size of the weekly drawdown. The pace matters more than the absolute level right now. Sustained large drawdowns are the leading indicator that formal administrative restrictions move from contingency plan to real action.
Watch Brent crude relative to $100. Sustained above is the path that tightens everything further. A credible resolution of the supply disruption could move oil back below $90 relatively quickly and change the entire complexion of this situation within weeks.
Watch your own household energy and grocery bills over the next two months. Not as a cause for panic, but as the ground-level read on whether official price suppression is holding or beginning to give way. Your own experience is data that no weekly statistical supplement captures.
This is a genuine macro stress moment. The people telling you it is nothing are wrong. The people telling you it is 1991 are also wrong.
For most households, the risk is real inflation pressure on food, fuel, and daily costs. Build a cash buffer if you have not. Avoid unnecessary large-ticket discretionary spending that is import-linked. And if you were planning a large jewellery purchase in the next few months, the 15 percent import duty that arrived overnight means prices are going up. That is a concrete, immediate household decision worth factoring in.
For equity investors, falling markets in external shock cycles have historically been where patient, fundamentals-driven investors build positions they are glad they built. The homework required to act well in this window is harder than it looks. Do the homework.
For businesses with dollar earnings and rupee costs, use the operational room to grow. Do not declare victory. The inflation hurting everyone else will eventually catch up to your cost base too.
We are all on the same boat. Some of us are positioned differently on it. But the weather is the same for everyone, and it is worth watching it honestly together.
If you are an investor, a founder, or just someone trying to make sense of what is happening to your savings right now, I want to hear how you are reading this. Comments open.
The launch numbers were good. Really good.
A supplements brand, clean formulations, strong community, founders who actually believed in what they were selling had rolled out “Subscribe & Save” on their Shopify store. Within the first six weeks, nearly four hundred customers had signed up. Monthly recurring revenue had a number against it for the first time. The team celebrated.
Twelve months later, they were at two hundred and twenty subscribers. The cohort had quietly halved. No dramatic cancellation spike, no bad reviews, no single moment they could point to. Just a slow, steady bleed.
When they came to us, the first thing they said was: “We don’t understand. The product works. The customers love it. Why are they leaving?”
We had seen this before. The product was not the problem. The model was.
The standard “Subscribe & Save” model was built for convenience. In 2020, that was enough. But convenience is now a commodity. Every supplement brand on Shopify offers it. The 10% discount that once felt like a reward now feels like a transaction. And transactions, unlike relationships, end the moment a better price appears elsewhere.
What actually kills subscriptions is subtler than price. It is guilt.
A customer buys a protein supplement with genuine intention. They subscribe because they plan to be consistent. Then life happens. The pouch from last month is still half full. The new one arrives. Now there are two. A third is coming. At some point, the subscription stops representing a health goal and starts representing a failure to keep up with it. The easiest way to make that feeling go away is to cancel.
A fixed 30-day shipment interval does not know any of this. It just ships.
This is the structural flaw at the heart of the 2020 subscription model. It was designed around the brand’s logistics, not the customer’s life. In 2026, that gap is fatal.
The future of retention on Shopify is not a recurring transaction. It is a recurring reason to stay.
Membership Commerce is not a rebrand of subscription. It is a different philosophy entirely. A subscription asks the customer to commit to a delivery schedule. A membership invites them into something worth belonging to.
The distinction matters because it changes what the customer is paying for. They are no longer paying for a product on a timer. They are paying for access, for status, for the feeling that this brand sees them as more than an order number. When you build that feeling into your Shopify architecture, churn stops being a logistics problem and becomes something you can actually engineer against.
Here is how it translates into real Shopify build decisions.
A 10% discount is forgettable. Early access to a new drop is not.
Shopify’s customer tagging system and Metaobjects let you build a genuinely gated storefront experience. Members see products before anyone else does. They get access to formulations or variants that are not available to the general store. They receive invitations to digital events, a live Q&A with the founder, a formulation walkthrough with the nutritionist behind the product.
None of this requires a new platform or a custom app. It requires a deliberate decision, at the theme level, about what your members see and when they see it. The technical lift is modest. The psychological effect on retention is not.
The box in the basement problem has a direct engineering solution: stop shipping a specific SKU on a fixed date and start giving members credit they can spend when they choose.
A member pays a recurring fee. That fee converts into store credit with a small bonus built in say, five hundred rupees a month becomes six hundred in credit. The member decides what to order and when. If they are well-stocked on protein, they spend the credit on something else from the range. If they need a double order one month and nothing the next, the credit accommodates that.
The guilt loop disappears because there is no unsolicited box. The relationship continues because the credit is already sitting in their account. This is not a workaround. It is a structurally superior model for any brand whose customers have variable consumption patterns which, in health and supplements, is almost every customer.
The brands that will define D2C retention in the next three years are not the ones sending the most messages. They are the ones sending the right message at the moment it is actually useful.
Shopify’s data hooks let you track purchase patterns and model consumption timelines at the customer level. Instead of shipping every thirty days regardless of reality, you send a single “running low?” notification when your data suggests they are approaching the end of a product. A one-click refill from that message feels like attentive service. A box that arrives before the previous one is finished feels like being ignored.
The difference between these two experiences, at scale, is the difference between a brand people recommend and a brand people quietly unsubscribe from.
Amazon Prime did not win because it offered free shipping. It won because once you had paid for the membership, your brain stopped considering alternatives. Every search for a product began and ended inside the Prime ecosystem because leaving it felt like waste.
A paid membership tier on your Shopify store can replicate this lock-in without replicating Amazon’s infrastructure. Free expedited shipping, priority support, member-only bundles, and early access bundled into a single annual fee shifts the customer’s mental model from “should I reorder from this brand?” to “I have already paid to be here, so yes.”
The customer who has paid for membership is also the customer most likely to refer a friend. Not because of a referral incentive, but because membership creates identity. People recommend the things they belong to.
We established in earlier posts in this series that a 5:1 LTV to CAC ratio is the only sustainable target for D2C in 2026. Membership Commerce is, at its core, an architectural decision to raise the numerator rather than endlessly fight the denominator.
A member spends more, stays longer, churns less, and refers more than a subscriber on a 10% discount. The maths are not close. The only question is whether your Shopify store is built to support this model or whether it is still running the 2020 playbook on a 2026 problem.
The supplements brand that came to us with two hundred and twenty subscribers did not need a better discount. They needed a better reason to stay. Once we rebuilt their retention architecture around membership logic rather than shipment logic, the bleed stopped.
The product had always been good enough. The model just needed to catch up.
This is the fifth post in my series on building a smarter D2C business on Shopify. The earlier posts covered why your retailer margin is costing you more than you think, why your ads might be lying to you, the hidden tax of discounting, and how to engineer a higher basket size without touching your traffic. Each one builds on the last.
If you want to move your Shopify store from a subscription model to a membership model, let us show you what that build looks like.
Last night at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi, Finn Allen walked to the crease with KKR needing 143 runs.
What followed was not a batting innings. It was a statement.
100 not out. 47 balls. Ten sixes. KKR chased down 143 with 34 balls to spare. Eight wickets in hand.
A few weeks ago, KKR had one point from six matches. One point. From rain. They were the laughing stock of the tournament. The only team that could not buy a win. I was writing in this blog every week about heartbreak and hope, watching Rinku Singh fight alone while the season slipped away.
This week, two more wins. Bringing the streak to four in a row.
From one point in six games to nine points in ten games.
The dead have risen. And they have risen because their bowlers found something that had been missing for the entire first half of the season.
Let me explain that properly. In each of KKR’s last four wins, it has been the bowling that set up the victory. Varun Chakravarthy and Narine strangling SRH’s middle order. The spinners choking DC on a slow surface last night. The bowling first, and the batting following with belief because the target was always achievable. This is not the batting-led chaos of the opening weeks. This is a team that has found a method.
Six Days. Seven Matches. A Week That Rewrote the Narrative.
Sunday May 3. A double-header. Two matches. Two completely contrasting stories.
The first in Hyderabad at 3:30 in the afternoon. SRH versus KKR. And the match that extended the streak to three.
KKR’s spinners took complete control. Varun Chakravarthy delivered a match-defining 3 for 36. Sunil Narine took 2 for 31. And in doing so, Narine quietly crossed a boundary that very few bowlers in this tournament’s history have reached.
He became only the third player in IPL history to take 200 wickets, joining Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Yuzvendra Chahal in an elite club.
Two hundred wickets. In a tournament where everyone bats and nobody can bowl. Narine has been doing this since 2012. Fourteen seasons. Still running in. Still dangerous. Still the most important player in this KKR squad when the game is in the balance.
SRH were bowled out for 165. Travis Head scored 61 off 28 but the KKR spinners put their foot on the throat in the middle overs and never let go. KKR blazed to 71 in the powerplay and chased it down with 10 balls to spare by 7 wickets.
Three consecutive wins. SRH’s five-match winning streak broken. And KKR heading into the second half of the tournament with something they did not have a week ago.
Belief.
The second match that Sunday evening in Ahmedabad. GT versus Punjab Kings. The table-toppers. The unbeaten away record. Against a GT side that had quietly found its rhythm.
Mohammed Siraj struck twice in the very first over. Priyansh Arya and Cooper Connolly both gone for cheap. PBKS 0 for 2 off the first over. Then Kagiso Rabada removed Prabhsimran Singh to make it a disastrous 35 for 3 at the end of the powerplay, their lowest of the season.
Jason Holder then ripped through the middle order with 4 for 24 to reduce PBKS to 47 for 5.
And then a 21-year-old nobody had heard of at the start of this season walked in.
Suryansh Shedge. 57 off 29 balls. His maiden IPL fifty. He and Marcus Stoinis built a 79-run partnership for the sixth wicket that dragged PBKS from 47 for 5 to 163 for 9.
The chase went all the way to the final ball. Washington Sundar needed to find a boundary off the last delivery to win it for GT. He swung hard. Six. GT won with one ball to spare. Their third win in a row.
Two teams. Both on winning streaks. Both finding something in the second half of the season that was missing in the first. The tournament is beautifully, chaotically alive.
Monday May 4. Wankhede. LSG versus MI. And the return of Rohit Sharma.
Rohit had not played in weeks. Hamstring injury. Gone for so long that you forgot what MI looked like with him in it.
LSG posted 228 for 5. Nicholas Pooran smashed 63 off just 21 balls, peppering the on-side with eight sixes. It looked like a very formidable total.
And then Rohit and Rickelton walked out together.
They stitched a 143-run opening partnership. Rickelton scored 83 off 32 balls. Rohit scored 84 off 44. Together they had the chase in MI’s pocket before the fifth over had ended.
That partnership. Rohit and Rickelton in full flow at Wankhede. The roar of the home crowd. This is what IPL is for. The big players arriving at the biggest moments. MI chased 229 with 8 balls to spare by 6 wickets.
MI climbing slowly back. LSG still bottom of the table. Both teams needing wins desperately. This result hurt one deeply and breathed life into the other.
Tuesday May 5. Delhi. DC versus CSK. And Sanju Samson proving, for the fourth time this season, that he is the most important batter in this tournament.
DC chose to bat on a slow, turning surface. It looked like a sensible decision at the toss. It looked like a catastrophic one by the end of the powerplay.
Akeal Hosein and Noor Ahmad combined for 7 overs of suffocating spin, conceding just 41 runs and picking up 3 crucial wickets. DC collapsed to 69 for 5 by the 11th over.
A late stand between Tristan Stubbs and Sameer Rizvi added 65 runs to give DC some respectability and they finished at 155 for 7.
Respectable. But against Samson, never quite enough.
Samson walked in and scored 87 not out off 52 balls. He and Kartik Sharma put on an unbroken 114 for the third wicket. CSK chased it in 17.3 overs with 8 wickets in hand.
Three centuries and two nineties this season for Samson. This man did not just change franchises. He changed the trajectory of this entire CSK campaign.
Over the last seven games, CSK’s bowlers have picked up 51 wickets at an economy of 8.15. Early in the season they were going at 11.37. The transformation is nothing short of remarkable.
Wednesday May 6. Hyderabad. SRH versus PBKS. And the most bittersweet innings of the week.
Cooper Connolly walked in with PBKS at 74 for 4 in the ninth over chasing a mountain of 236.
SRH had posted 235 for 4. The usual Head and Abhishek show at the top, followed by Klaasen smashing 69 off 43 and Ishan Kishan adding 55 off 32. It looked unachievable.
Connolly did not get that memo.
He batted as though the target was 180. Unfazed. Unflappable. Picking his moments, shifting through the gears, hitting everything in the arc between midwicket and long-on with contemptuous precision. He reached his century in the final over. 107 not out off 59 balls. Seven fours. Eight sixes. The first century of his professional career in any format.
But PBKS still lost by 33 runs. The next highest score in their innings was 28.
One man carrying an entire team on his back. It was not enough. It never is when you are chasing 236 alone. But Connolly’s hundred deserved a better result than this. On any other day, against any other bowling attack, that innings wins you the match comfortably.
SRH moved to the top of the points table with this win. PBKS have now lost three in a row. The table-toppers stumbled. A new team has taken the summit. The playoff race is magnificently, terrifyingly tight.
Thursday May 7. Lucknow. LSG versus RCB. And Mitchell Marsh in a one-man hurricane.
Three rain breaks. The match stopped and started more times than a Delhi autorickshaw in traffic. And through all of it, Marsh barely noticed.
111 off 56 balls. A 20-ball fifty. A 49-ball century. Nine fours. Nine sixes. Targeting every arc of the ground with the kind of certainty that makes watching batting feel effortless.
Each time the rain came, Marsh walked off, came back, and continued exactly where he left off. Like someone had pressed pause on a video and then play again. Rishabh Pant then added 32 off 10 balls at the death to take LSG to 209 for 3 in 19 overs with the DLS method in operation.
The revised DLS target for RCB was 213 in 19 overs. Rajat Patidar scored 61 but Prince Yadav took 3 for 33 and LSG held their nerve to win by 9 runs.
LSG had lost six in a row before this. Six consecutive defeats. They were in freefall. And then Marsh walked in on a rain-interrupted evening in Lucknow and reminded everyone what this team can do when its best player fires.
RCB remain in the top four. But their stranglehold on that position is loosening. The next two weeks will define everything.
Friday May 8. Delhi. DC versus KKR. And the night I opened this blog with.
DC restricted to 142 for 8. KKR’s spinners Anukul Roy and Sunil Narine choked the middle order on a slow surface. Finn Allen then walked out and hit 100 not out off 47 balls with ten sixes. KKR chased it with 34 balls to spare.
Four wins in a row. The bowling first, always the bowling first. Then the batting with freedom because the target is always manageable. This is not luck. This is a method.
The Story Underneath All These Stories
This week told us something important about IPL 2026 that the run-feast weeks had obscured.
This tournament has not lost its balance. It has just been showing you its batting side for five straight weeks. When conditions shift slightly, when a spinner finds turn, when a seamer finds bounce, the game snaps back to equilibrium instantly.
KKR’s two spinners shut down the SRH batting machine. CSK’s spinners choked DC on a slow Delhi surface. GT’s pacers blew Punjab Kings away in the first over at Ahmedabad. And Mitchell Marsh made nonsense of rain delays and RCB bowling in the same evening.
The game contains everything. We just needed to wait for it to show us all its faces.
The Playoff Picture As It Stands
SRH at the top with 14 points from 11 games. PBKS second with 13 from 10. Then RCB, RR and GT all on 12 points from 10. CSK on 10. And KKR on 9 from 10, breathing fire.
The playoffs begin May 26. Every single match from here is a final.
Tell Me What You Think
Which comeback story of this week moved you the most?
KKR’s four in a row? Connolly’s maiden century that still ended in defeat? Rohit and Rickelton’s 143-run partnership at Wankhede? Or Mitchell Marsh batting through three rain breaks like he was in a net session?
And KKR fans. Four wins in a row. Are you finally starting to believe?
Because I am. For the first time this season, I genuinely am.
Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.
If you missed last week’s blog, read it here.
She had built something real.
Seven years on Amazon and Myntra. A skincare brand that had earned its reviews one customer at a time. A product that genuinely worked. When she finally launched her own Shopify store, she felt like she had arrived.
Three months later, she called us.
Her traffic was healthy. Her conversion rate was acceptable. But her cart abandonment had shot up and nobody could tell her why. She had installed four different apps trying to diagnose the problem. Her site had slowed down. Her customers were leaving with one item in their bag and not coming back.
“On Amazon,” she said, “people always buy more than they came for. On my site, they buy exactly what they searched for and nothing else.”
That sentence told us everything.
On Amazon and Myntra, the platform does the upselling for you. There is an entire engineering team whose only job is to make sure the customer leaves with a bigger basket. Bundles appear automatically. Progress bars fill themselves. The next logical product is always two scrolls away. The founder never has to think about any of it.
The moment you move to Shopify, that invisible hand disappears. And most brands never replace it.
The cart does not abandon itself. The customer simply sees a single product with a single “Add to Cart” button and no reason to do anything else.
What she needed was not another app. She needed her Shopify theme to do the work that Amazon had been quietly doing for years. And in 2026, Liquid and Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility give you everything you need to build it in.
A static banner that says “Free Shipping over ₹999” is wallpaper. Nobody reads it. But a cart that says “You are ₹120 away from free shipping” and updates in real time as items are added, that is a game.
Liquid can calculate the difference between cart.total_price and your shipping threshold at every cart update. The moment that gap closes to a small number, the customer’s brain shifts from “shopping” to “completing.” The perk stops feeling like a corporate policy and starts feeling like a personal challenge. The psychological distance between a static rule and a dynamic countdown is enormous and the engineering to close that gap is simpler than most brands think.
The “Customers also bought” section on most Shopify stores is a graveyard of irrelevance. A wireless speaker next to a yoga mat. A face wash next to a protein shaker. These suggestions do not convert because they do not make sense.
Liquid lets you read the current product’s tags and collection before deciding what to surface. If someone is looking at your premium moisturiser, show them your toner and your SPF. Hard-code those associations in the theme logic itself. Place the block directly beneath the “Add to Cart” button, not buried below the fold.
The difference between a generic recommendation and a contextually logical one is not a bigger dataset. It is a cleaner decision about what belongs next to what. Make that decision once in your theme and let Liquid execute it on every page, every time.
The moment a customer completes a purchase, something shifts. The anxiety of the decision is gone. The trust is at its highest point it will ever be. They are not guarding their wallet anymore.
Shopify’s checkout extensibility now lets you place a one-time offer on the “Thank You” page or the post-purchase intermediate page. The shipping address is saved. The payment method is saved. Adding one more item is a single tap. No re-entering of details. No additional friction.
A complementary product at a slight premium offered at this precise moment can lift your total order value by ten to fifteen percent across your entire store. Not through manipulation. Through timing.
For consumables, a serum, a supplement, a coffee blend, the repeat purchase is always coming. The only question is whether it comes from your store or a competitor’s the next time.
Liquid can detect how many units of a product are in the cart and respond accordingly. One unit triggers a message: add two more and save ten percent. This is not a discount in the traditional sense. It is a unit economics argument delivered at exactly the right moment. You ship three items in one box instead of one item in three separate orders over three months. Your margins improve. Your customer saves. Neither of you loses.
Sometimes the fastest path to a higher AOV is not another product. It is a service wrapper around the product the customer has already chosen.
A Liquid toggle in the cart for eco-friendly packaging, gift wrapping, or priority processing, priced at a small premium, costs you almost nothing to deliver but contributes directly to your contribution margin. More importantly, it lets the customer feel like they are customising their experience. That feeling of control is itself a reason to complete the purchase.
The brands that thrive are not the ones with the most apps. They are the ones who understood that the upselling logic belongs inside the theme, not bolted on top of it.
When you move these triggers from external apps into your core Shopify Liquid, you cut site bloat, you recover loading speed, and you create a path to profitability that does not depend on anything outside your own codebase.
The founder who called us three months into her Shopify launch did not have a traffic problem or a product problem. She had an engineering gap. Once we closed it, her basket size moved. Her abandonment rate fell. And she stopped comparing her Shopify store to Amazon as if Amazon had done her some special favour.
Amazon had not done her a favour. Amazon had done the engineering she had never had to think about.
Now it was hers.
This is the fourth blog in my series on building a smarter D2C business on Shopify. If you missed the earlier posts on why your retailer margin is costing you more than you think, why your ads might be lying to you, and the hidden tax of discounting — read them in order. This one makes more sense when you do.
If you want to engineer your Shopify store to do the work that the marketplace used to do for you, we can help.
Let me start with a Sunday.
Not any particular Sunday. Just a Bengali Sunday. The kind that starts with the smell of mustard oil heating in a kadai before you have even properly opened your eyes. The kind where someone in the kitchen is humming a Rabindra Sangeet without knowing they are doing it. Where the newspaper is fought over before chai arrives. Where the adda at the neighbourhood tea stall has already been going on for two hours and the topic has moved from last night’s match to Tagore’s philosophy to the price of hilsa, all without anyone declaring a change of subject.
That is bangaliana. Not a museum piece. A living, breathing, arguing, singing, slightly-chaotic way of being in the world.
Now let me tell you what has been happening to it.
Somewhere over the last two decades, as Bengal’s political temperature rose and its economy stalled and its best minds left for Bangalore and London, our identity got reduced. Reduced to a political football. Reduced to a stereotype. Reduced to something that outsiders feel comfortable dismissing in two sentences. I have sat at dinner tables in Bangalore where someone casually called Satyajit Ray “too slow.” I have been in rooms where Sourav Ganguly was called “arrogant” with a smirk that had nothing to do with cricket. I have watched the quiet that follows these moments, the Bengali in the room doing the math of whether it is worth the fight.
It is always worth the fight. We just forgot how to start it.
So let me start it. Not with anger. With facts. With story. With the kind of evidence that does not need to shout because it is simply, devastatingly true.
Most people’s knowledge of Bengal starts around 1757, with the Battle of Plassey, the moment the British effectively took control. That is a terrible place to start. It is like reading a biography from the chapter titled “downfall.”
Let us go back further. Much further.
When Alexander the Great marched his army east across the known world, undefeated, unstoppable, burning with the ambition to reach the edge of the earth, it was the report of the Gangaridai that stopped him. The Gangaridai were the people of the Bengal delta. The Greeks wrote about them with something approaching awe: a kingdom with six thousand war elephants, an army so formidable that even Alexander’s battle-hardened generals sat down and refused to march further.
Alexander, who never lost a battle, turned around at Bengal’s doorstep.
This is not mythology. It is recorded in Greek histories. The man who conquered Persia, Egypt, and most of the known world decided Bengal was too much trouble. Think about that the next time someone acts like Bengal is a peripheral place.
Then came the Pala Empire, born on Bengali soil in the 8th century. The Palas hosted the university of Nalanda, spread Buddhism to Tibet and Southeast Asia, and produced advances in sculpture and education that shaped the intellectual map of half a continent. When the Pala king Gopala I was chosen by an assembly of chieftains to lead Bengal, it was arguably the first democratic election in South Asian history. A Bengali king, chosen by consent, centuries before the word “democracy” arrived from the West.
This is the soil from which bangaliana grows. It is very old soil. Very deep roots.
I want to tell you about Khudiram Bose. Not the textbook version. The human version.
He was born in Midnapore in 1889, lost both his parents by the age of six, and was raised by his elder sister. He was not a particularly good student. What he was, from very early on, was furious. The specific fury of someone who looks at the world and cannot accept that it is allowed to be this unjust.
By fifteen, he was distributing pamphlets against the British and getting arrested for it. By sixteen, he was planting bombs near police stations. He had decided, with a clarity that most adults never achieve about anything, that slavery was the worst disease people could suffer.
On August 11, 1908, at the age of eighteen, Khudiram Bose was hanged by the British for his role in the Muzaffarpur bombing conspiracy. He was one of India’s youngest revolutionary freedom fighters to be executed. He walked to the gallows holding a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. The Amrita Bazar Patrika carried the story the next day under the headline: “Khudiram’s End: Died cheerful and smiling.”
The weavers of Bengal mourned him the way Bengal mourns its own, by weaving his name into the borders of dhotis. Schoolboys wore those dhotis as a statement. A boy who never finished school became the symbol of a generation that refused to finish the fight.
Khudiram Bose is not a footnote in the independence movement. He is the spirit of it, distilled to its purest form. And he was Bengali.
Here is something they do not tell you in standard Indian history textbooks: Mahatma Gandhi’s most powerful tools, the boycott, the mass movement, the economic non-cooperation were not invented by him. He scaled them. He refined them. He gave them his own moral architecture.
But the prototype was built in Bengal, in 1905.
When Lord Curzon decided to partition Bengal, splitting unified people along religious lines in what nationalists rightly called a deliberate “divide and rule” strategy, Bengal did not write petitions and wait. Bengal erupted. On August 7, 1905, from the Town Hall in Calcutta, the Swadeshi Movement was formally launched, the first organized mass collective action in the Indian Independence Movement. People burned British cloth in the streets. They boycotted Manchester cotton and Liverpool salt. They built parallel schools, parallel industries, parallel institutions. In Barisal, a single organizer set up more than 150 branches of a volunteer association in a Muslim-majority district. Hindus and Muslims tied rakhis on each other’s wrists on the day Bengal was officially partitioned, in a gesture Rabindranath Tagore organized himself.
The British were taken completely off-guard. They had calculated that India was too fragmented, too hierarchical, too compliant to sustain mass resistance. Bengal proved them wrong. And then, years later, Gandhi watched how Bengal had done it, and built his own movements on the same foundation.
Gandhi called the Swadeshi movement “the soul of Swaraj.” The soul was Bengali.
India has a national anthem. India has a national song. Both were written by Bengalis.
Jana Gana Mana, written by Rabindranath Tagore, was first sung at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1911. It became India’s national anthem. Vande Mataram, written in Sanskritised Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the 1870s, became India’s national song.
The story behind Vande Mataram is itself a story of Bengali defiance. Bankim Chandra was a deputy collector returning home in his palanquin when a British colonel playing cricket had him assaulted for disrupting the game. Bankim took him to court. The court ordered the colonel to apologize publicly. And he did in an open courtroom, in front of Bengali lawyers and clerks and witnesses. Out of that moment of refusing to be diminished, out of that insistence on dignity, a man went home and eventually wrote a song that would fuel a revolution and become the national song of a free country.
Every time Vande Mataram is sung at a Republic Day function, every time Jana Gana Mana rises at the start of a cricket match, every time an 18-year-old belts it out on Independence Day there is a Bengali voice at the origin of that sound. Usually uncredited. Always present.
Subhash Chandra Bose ranked fourth in the Indian Civil Service examination. The ICS was the most competitive test in the British Empire. Clearing it meant a secure, prestigious, powerful life guaranteed. He resigned to join the freedom struggle.
That resignation is the man in a single sentence.
On October 21, 1943, in Singapore, Netaji proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind. He was its Prime Minister, its Head of State, its Minister of War. Eleven sovereign nations recognised this government. He commanded the Indian National Army, 40,000 strong. The INA planted the Indian tricolor in Moirang, Manipur, in 1944, the first time in the 20th century that Indian soil was claimed by an Indian revolutionary force.
And when Netaji needed an anthem for his provisional government, he chose Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana. He asked his team to translate it from Tagore’s classical Bengali into simple Hindi so every soldier could connect with it. His brief to them, reportedly, was that when the anthem played, it should be so rousing that the auditorium itself should shatter in half to reveal the sky above.
Even the ambition was poetic. That is what Bengalis do, they command military forces and ask for poetry at the same time.
September 11, 1893. Chicago. The Parliament of the World’s Religions.
A young Bengali monk walked to the podium and addressed the hall as “Sisters and brothers of America.”
Two-minute standing ovation. Before he had said anything else.
Swami Vivekananda then proceeded to tell the Western world what Sanatan Dharma actually was, not the caricature of superstition and strange rituals that colonial scholarship had constructed, but a profound philosophical tradition that had been teaching religious tolerance for centuries. He said, “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.”
The hall had not heard this before. Not from the East. Not with this confidence, this warmth, this clarity.
Vivekananda spent years in America and England after that, lecturing at Harvard, establishing Vedanta centres, writing letters that are still studied today. When he founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, it became the first organisation in India to merge monastic discipline with systematic humanitarian service, hospitals, schools, famine relief because he believed that serving the poor was the highest form of worship.
Today, when people talk about Sanatan Dharma finding a global audience, they are building on what a Bengali built first. In 1893. In Chicago. In a room full of strangers he immediately called his brothers and sisters.
I will not give you a list of Tagore’s achievements. You can find that in any encyclopedia.
What I want to tell you is this: Rabindranath Tagore wrote approximately 2,232 songs. We call them Rabindra Sangeet. And here is what is remarkable, Bengalis still know them. Not professionally trained singers. Just Bengalis. Your aunt who teaches in school. Your elderly neighbour. The man at the fish market. Hum a few bars of a Tagore song in a room full of Bengalis and the room will quietly, involuntarily, finish it.
That is a cultural depth that is almost impossible to explain to someone who has not experienced it. It is like a language inside a language. A shared memory encoded in melody.
Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first Asian to do so. He founded Visva-Bharati, a university built in open air, with classes under trees, designed to dissolve the boundary between learning and living. He wrote the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh. When the British massacred 379 unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, Tagore returned his knighthood in protest. He was one of the first public figures in the Empire to formally reject a colonial honour.
He was also, this part matters to me personally, the creator of Feluda and the literary world that Satyajit Ray inherited. Tagore’s nephew Abanindranath Tagore painted the original Bharat Mata. His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore was one of India’s first industrialists. The Tagore family alone is a civilisational contribution.
Every year, for five days in October, something happens in Kolkata that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the world.
The city stops. Not the way a city stops for a holiday, shops closed, streets empty, people at home. The opposite. The city stops being a city and becomes something else entirely. A six-crore-people family reunion. An open-air art festival. A collective exhale that an entire civilisation has been holding since the previous October.
Durga Puja is not a religious event that also has cultural elements. It is a cultural event that contains religion the way a river contains water, it is there, it is essential, but it is not the whole story. The pandals that go up across Kolkata are not decorations. They are statements. Architects, sculptors, painters, lighting designers, and craftspeople spend months building them. Every para, every neighbourhood competes. Not for prizes, though prizes exist. For the right to say: this year, we made something extraordinary.
I grew up with that competition. Growing up in Kolkata, Puja was the calendar around which everything else was measured. The new clothes. The specific smell of shiuli flowers in the morning air that you only get in October. The dhak starting up at dawn. The way the entire city starts moving differently as Mahalaya approaches, a little lighter, a little louder, a little more itself.
And the food. I cannot write about Puja without the food. The bhog at the pandal, khichuri and labra and chutney served on a dona, sitting on the floor with strangers who are not really strangers because it is Puja and everyone is family for five days. The rolls from the stalls that appear overnight and vanish after Dashami. The mishti that Bengali households send to each other and receive from each other in a loop of sweetness that has nothing to do with calories and everything to do with connection.
What most people outside Bengal do not understand is that Durga Puja is the annual proof of bangaliana. It is where the Bengali relationship with art, with community, with religion, with food, with argument, with adda, with identity, all of it, is expressed simultaneously and at full volume. The UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity tag that Kolkata’s Durga Puja received in 2021 was not a surprise to anyone who has stood in the Puja crowds at two in the morning, watching a city that should be asleep but is instead awake and luminous.
Tagore wrote about Durga Puja. Rabindra Sangeet is inseparable from its rituals. The same culture that produced the national anthem, the revolutionaries, the scientists, and the filmmakers, it all comes home to these five days every year. Durga Puja is bangaliana gathered into one place and turned up as loud as it goes.
It is also, if you want to understand why Bengalis feel the way we do about our identity, the most honest answer. We are the people who do this. This is what we are protecting. Not just the history, not just the achievements, this. The dhak at dawn. The shiuli on the ground. The bhog eaten sitting with strangers. The feeling, for five days every year, that the world is exactly the right size and we are exactly where we belong.
If you have ever studied quantum mechanics, you have encountered Satyendra Nath Bose without knowing it. A class of subatomic particles, bosons, is named after him. The Higgs boson. The photon. Every time a physicist uses the word “boson,” they are invoking a Bengali name.
In 1924, Bose wrote a paper on the statistical behaviour of photons that was so original no European journal would publish it. He sent it directly to Albert Einstein. Einstein recognised it immediately, translated it himself into German, and got it published. The result, Bose-Einstein Statistics, is one of the foundational frameworks of modern physics.
Then there is Jagadish Chandra Bose, who demonstrated wireless signalling using electromagnetic waves in 1895 before Marconi. Who then turned to botany and proved that plants have electrical responses to stimuli structurally similar to animal tissue. He built instruments sensitive enough to measure a plant growing in real time. He created the field of biophysics. The Bose Institute in Kolkata, which he founded with his own money, was India’s first multidisciplinary research institute.
And P.C. Mahalanobis, who founded the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931, introduced the statistical measure that still bears his name, and designed India’s post-independence economic planning architecture.
Three Bengali scientists. A fundamental particle, the field of biophysics, and the mathematical foundation of modern data science, all carrying Bengali fingerprints.
This is the one people argue with me about. So let me be precise.
The first jute mill in India was established in 1855 at Rishra, on the banks of the Hooghly River near Calcutta. Within decades, the banks of the Hooghly were lined with mills. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Calcutta had surpassed Dundee, Scotland, as the world’s premier centre for jute manufacturing. The Bengal Presidency had the highest gross domestic product in all of British India. Calcutta was the capital of the British Indian empire, the commercial, administrative, and intellectual centre of the entire subcontinent.
The British moved their capital to Delhi in 1911. Historians generally agree this was partly because Bengal had become too politically conscious, too organised, too resistant to control from within.
Read that again: the British moved their capital because Bengal frightened them.
Pather Panchali was made in 1955 on almost no budget, shot on weekends, and very nearly abandoned when funding dried up. The Government of West Bengal almost pulled the plug. Ray continued anyway. When it was done, it won eleven international awards, including recognition at Cannes. It went on to be called one of the greatest films ever made.
Ray is the only Indian filmmaker to have won top prizes at both the Venice and Berlin film festivals. In 1992, the Academy gave him an Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement. They gave it to him in his hospital room in Kolkata, because he was too ill to travel to Los Angeles. He received it propped up in his bed. He gave a speech in that condition that made the room in Hollywood fall silent.
Martin Scorsese has called him one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. Akira Kurosawa said something similar. These are not small names handing out compliments lightly.
When someone tells me Satyajit Ray was “just a regional filmmaker,” I think about what the word “regional” is really doing in that sentence. Chekhov was from Taganrog. Tolstoy was Russian. The local detail was the vessel. The humanity was universal. Ray was Bengali. The films belong to the world.
Mrinal Sen. Ritwik Ghatak. Aparna Sen. The tradition Ray came from and the one he created, it is one of the great cinematic lineages in human history. From one city. From one language.
I am a Mohun Bagan supporter. Have been since I was old enough to know what football was. And I say this with the full knowledge of what Mohun Bagan means beyond football: it is the club that, in 1911, sent barefoot Indian players onto a field against the East Yorkshire Regiment of the British Army and won the IFA Shield.
Barefoot. Against a professional military team. In colonial India.
The Ananda Bazar Patrika called it a victory that made every Bengali proud. It was not just sport. It was a statement, in the clearest possible language, that Indians could beat the British on a level playing field. The Swadeshi movement was using boycotts and pamphlets. Mohun Bagan used football.
Sailen Manna captained India to the Asian Games Gold Medal in 1951. Chuni Goswami led India to the second Gold in 1962, a player so gifted that Tottenham Hotspur invited him to trial and he chose to stay home. P.K. Banerjee was among the most technically complete footballers India ever produced.
The Durand Cup. The IFA Shield. The Santosh Trophy. For decades, these trophies had Bengali fingerprints all over them. The soul of Indian football was hammered into shape on the Maidan, in Kolkata, by Bengali men who played the game with the same intensity with which their grandfathers had fought the British.
I need to be honest about what Sourav Ganguly meant to me. Not as a cricket fan in general. As a Bengali.
For a long time, Indian cricket had a particular relationship with self-deprecation. We were a home-side team. We were polite visitors overseas. We lost abroad and came back and explained why it was difficult. When Australia enforced the follow-on at Eden Gardens in 2001, I think most of us quietly prepared for the inevitable.
Ganguly did not prepare for the inevitable. He won. He made VVS Laxman and Harbhajan Singh win with him, in what is still considered one of the greatest Test match reversals in history.
Then he went to Lord’s, won, and waved his shirt from the balcony.
That shirt-wave was not arrogance. It was a statement. It said: we are allowed to celebrate when we win. We are allowed to be loud about it. We are allowed to make them feel what they made us feel.
Ganguly was the first Indian captain to build a team that believed it could win anywhere. He was the first to foster the culture that eventually produced Dhoni’s fearless finishers and Kohli’s aggressive red-ball cricket. The tree that grew after Ganguly grew because he changed the soil.
He is Bengali. He never pretended otherwise. Some people have never forgiven him for either.
Kadambini Ganguly became one of the first female graduates in the British Empire in 1883, then became the first woman to practice Western medicine in India, at a time when the medical establishment was actively trying to prevent her from qualifying.
Asima Chatterjee became the first Indian woman to receive a Doctor of Science degree in 1944. In chemistry. In the middle of the Second World War. In a country that was still under colonial rule.
Ashapurna Devi won the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour in 1976, the first woman to do so. Arati Saha swam the English Channel in 1959, the first Indian and Asian woman to do it.
These women did not have easy paths. Bengal’s reform movement led by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in the 19th century fought for women’s education and against practices like sati and child marriage, decades before most of India had the conversation. The women who broke these barriers were products of that fight. They stood on the shoulders of men who had the decency to demand that the shoulders be offered.
I cannot write about Bengal without writing about 1947.
When independence came, Bengal was cut in two. It was torn. Families split overnight by lines drawn by a British barrister, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited Bengal before he was asked to partition it. He arrived, spent five weeks, drew a line, and left. He later said he had no wish to return to India and see what he had done.
Approximately 10 million people were displaced in the Bengal partition. Hindus moved west, Muslims moved east, and the violence that accompanied the movement was savage on both sides. Entire villages emptied. Families walked for days carrying what they could. The city of Calcutta, already strained, absorbed wave after wave of refugees who settled in shanties that became permanent neighbourhoods.
And here is what I find almost impossible to explain to people who were not part of this tradition: in the same decade that this happened, Bengali culture produced some of its greatest work. Ritwik Ghatak made films about Partition refugees with a rawness that was almost unbearable to watch. Jibanananda Das wrote poetry that captured the grief of losing a homeland so precisely it still feels like an open wound. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali, on which Ray’s film was based, was a meditation on a Bengal that was already disappearing even before the partition completed its work.
People absorbed a catastrophe and turned it into art. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the definition of a civilisation.
The culture of Bengal is under pressure today, not from outside forces alone, but from the slow attrition of disconnection. The generation that grew up on Feluda and Byomkesh is giving way to one that may not have read them. The political noise around Bengali identity has become so loud that it has drowned out the substance of what that identity actually contains.
We have allowed “bangaliana” to become a campaign slogan when it is, in fact, a civilisation.
This article is a beginning. A reminder. A provocation.
Know your history not to live in it, but to be made larger by it. Carry it forward with the same seriousness that Vivekananda carried Vedanta, that Tagore carried poetry, that Ganguly carried a cricket bat in foreign stadiums where people wanted him to fail.
Do not wait for others to tell your story accurately. They will not. They never have.
Tell it yourself. Tell it loudly. Tell it well.
On April 25, two IPL matches produced 986 runs in a single day.
Nine hundred and eighty-six runs. In one day of cricket.
Across those two matches, 16 catches were dropped. Sixteen. That number alone explains the 986 runs more than any discussion about pitches or power-hitting.
I have been watching cricket since 1983. I have loved this game through every era. The seaming tracks of the 80s. The spin duels of the 90s. The T20 revolution that began in 2008. I have always believed cricket is at its best when bat and ball are fighting each other honestly.
What I watched this week was not always a fight. Sometimes it was an execution. And the people being executed were the bowlers.
But this is not a simple story. Because this week also gave us a Super Over that had me out of my chair at midnight. And a Monday evening in Delhi where two world-class seamers reminded everyone what this game looks like when the bowlers have something to work with.
This is the story of a week that could not decide what kind of cricket it wanted to be.
Seven Days. Eight Matches. Let Me Take You Through It.
Saturday April 26. A double-header. Two matches. Two completely different stories.
The first at Chepauk. CSK versus GT. Not a run-feast. A chess match.
Kagiso Rabada took 3 for 25 and broke the CSK top order open in the powerplay. Ruturaj Gaikwad was left stranded, batting through the innings to finish on 74 not out while wickets tumbled around him. CSK managed only 158 for 7.
In that second over, Samson was beaten three times in four balls by Siraj. When he did finally get a boundary off Rabada, it was his 5000th IPL run, making him the fastest Indian batter to reach that landmark. But losing him early cost CSK everything. Twenty-four percent of their runs this season have come off his bat. When Samson goes cheaply, the rest of the lineup shows its limitations.
Sai Sudharsan then made it look childishly simple. 87 off 46 balls, targeting the mid-wicket and long-on boundaries with contemptuous ease. GT chased 159 with 20 balls to spare.
And then the second match. Lucknow. LSG versus KKR. And the most dramatic finish of my week.
I need a moment here.
Mohsin Khan walked in and took 5 for 23. The best bowling figures of the season at the Ekana. KKR were reduced to 31 for 4.
At that point I had already started accepting another defeat.
Then Rinku Singh walked in. And everything changed.
83 not out off 51 balls. Alone. Completely alone for most of the innings. He dragged KKR from 31 for 4 to 155 for 7, absorbing pressure, taking the game deep, refusing to accept that it was over.
And then the last ball. Mohammed Shami, of all people, swung and hit a sixer off the final delivery to tie the match at 155 and force the first Super Over of IPL 2026.
I aged ten years in that moment.
Sunil Narine walked out to bowl the Super Over. Thirty-seven years old. The most experienced man in the pressure situation. He conceded just 1 run and took the wickets of Nicholas Pooran and Aiden Markram in three balls. The lowest total in Super Over history. Rinku then hit the winning runs off the very first delivery.
Here is what that match was. A genuine cricket match. A bowler dominated. A lone batter refused to surrender. A match went to the final ball, then to a Super Over. Tension from the first over to the last. No flat pitch. No 265-run carnage. Just cricket at its purest, most honest best.
That is what this game can be. That is what it should be.
Monday April 27. Delhi. DC versus RCB. And another reminder of what cricket looks like when bowlers have something to work with.
Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar bowled DC out for 75. DC registered the lowest powerplay score in IPL history, 13 for 6. Bhuvneshwar set the tone. Hazlewood dismissed KL Rahul and Sameer Rizvi in the second over. Tristan Stubbs, Axar Patel, Nitish Rana followed in quick succession. DC were bowled out inside 15 overs.
RCB chased it in 6.3 overs. Nine wickets in hand. Eighty-one balls to spare. The second fastest victory in IPL history in terms of balls remaining.
Kohli pushed one down the ground and became the first batter in IPL history to score 9,000 runs. Even the milestone felt almost incidental.
The DC humiliation highlighted something important. When conditions are even slightly bowler friendly and world-class seamers are operating, the same batters who had been smashing centuries were suddenly playing and missing, edging, and walking back having scored 2 or 3 runs.
Tuesday April 28. Mullanpur. PBKS versus RR. And Punjab Kings finally tasted defeat.
PBKS posted 222 for 4. Marcus Stoinis came in late and blazed 62 off 22 balls, taking 24 off the final over to push them to a total that looked formidable.
But here is what the data says about this match that most people missed. Punjab Kings are the worst fielding side in IPL 2026 this season, having dropped 13 catches in 7 games, 8 of which were easy chances. Their catch efficiency sits at just 77.7%. They have been winning despite themselves. Their batting has been so extraordinary that it has masked a fielding unit that would have been punished by any other team.
Suryavanshi hit 43 off 16 balls. Jaiswal scored 51 off 27. Ferreira finished on 52 not out off 26 and Dubey hit 31 not out off 12 as an impact player. RR chased 223 with four balls to spare by six wickets.
Punjab’s first loss. And it came from RR simply batting better at the death than PBKS bowled.
Wednesday April 29. Wankhede. MI versus SRH. The match where a man scored 123 not out and still lost.
Ryan Rickelton’s unbeaten 123 off 55 balls was the highest individual score ever by a Mumbai Indians batter in IPL history. MI posted 243 for 5, their highest first-innings total.
And then Travis Head walked out.
Head scored 76 off 30 balls. He and Abhishek Sharma put on 129 runs in the opening partnership with 93 coming in the powerplay alone. Bumrah went for 28 in his first two overs. Klaasen then came in and smashed 65 not out off 30. SRH completed the fourth-highest successful chase in IPL history with 8 balls to spare.
Jasprit Bumrah. Went for 28 runs. In two overs. Let that settle in your mind for a moment.
The pitch at Wankhede offered absolutely nothing for the bowlers. A flat, dry, lifeless surface where every ball sits up and begs to be hit. And dew in the night match made the ball wet and harder to grip in the second innings, reducing spinners’ effectiveness and making life even harder for the pacers.
Rickelton’s 123 not out. In any other era, that innings wins you the match comfortably and gets talked about for years. In IPL 2026, on that pitch, on that night, it was not enough.
Thursday April 30. Ahmedabad. GT versus RCB. And the defending champions were undone.
Jason Holder was omnipresent. Five dismissals in total, two wickets and three catches including a breathtaking diving grab off Patidar while running back from deep backward square. Arshad Khan took 3 for 22. RCB were bowled out for 155 with four balls unused in their innings.
Shubman Gill then welcomed Hazlewood with 24 runs in the opening over, the most expensive over Hazlewood has ever bowled in an IPL match. Gill made 43 off 18 balls before Kohli grabbed a sharp catch at cover. Buttler smashed 39 off 19. GT got over the line with 25 balls to spare.
RCB’s third defeat. The race at the top is genuinely tightening now. PBKS, RCB, RR and SRH all locked in a brutal fight for the top four spots.
May 1. Jaipur. RR versus DC. And DC finally found their way back to winning. KL Rahul scored a fifty and Nissanka also made one as DC chased down 226 to register a much-needed victory and return to winning ways.
And finally last night. May 2. Chepauk. CSK versus MI. A match that was notable not just for what happened but for what did not.
MI posted 159. CSK chased it down with eight wickets to spare. Gaikwad closed in on a fifty. CSK did the double over Mumbai Indians this season. Both Rohit Sharma and MS Dhoni were absent. Two men who have defined their respective franchise and this tournament for fifteen years, both watching from the sidelines.
Hardik Pandya confirmed there was still no Rohit Sharma. Ruturaj confirmed Dhoni was still recovering from his calf injury.
That last detail sits uncomfortably. Dhoni, absent from every match day this season. His disembodied voice played over stadium speakers at Chepauk every time CSK hit a boundary. The legend reduced to a DJ sample. That feels wrong on a level I cannot quite articulate.
The Big Question This Week Cannot Stop Asking
Are the bowlers even playing the same game?
The honest answer is: sometimes yes. But increasingly, no.
IPL 2026 has produced a lot of venues with flat, batter-friendly tracks offering minimal seam activity. The conditions tighten the margin of error for bowlers to almost nothing. No ball is safe from extreme punishment.
Dew in night matches makes the ball wet and harder to grip. Spinners get less turn. Pacers struggle to control their line and length. The chasing team has a distinct advantage built into the very conditions of the game.
But it is not just the pitches. It is the fielding.
On April 25 alone, 16 catches were dropped across two matches. In the DC versus PBKS game, Karun Nair dropped Shreyas Iyer twice in quick succession. Mukesh Kumar turned a catch into a six by stepping on the rope. If Iyer is removed when he was dropped, the chase could have collapsed. Instead he batted on, settled, and took the game away.
In the RR versus SRH match the same day, Jadeja, of all people, spilled one of the easiest catches imaginable. He overran left, adjusted late, lost balance, and dropped Abhishek Sharma. Abhishek had already given two chances before that.
The bowlers are not all having bad seasons. Bhuvneshwar Kumar has 17 wickets. Jofra Archer and Anshul Kamboj have 14 each. These are world-class performers doing their job. But they are doing it without a safety net. Flat pitches. Dew. Batters who have studied every variation. And fielders who are dropping catches that should be taken in their sleep.
This week gave us both extremes. The Wankhede carnage where 243 was chased. And Monday in Delhi where a pitch with a little grass and two world-class seamers reduced the same IPL batting universe to 75 all out.
The game is not broken. But the conditions are being selected inconsistently. And until that changes, bowlers will keep running in hard, hitting their marks, and watching the ball disappear over the rope.
KKR. Two Wins From Eight Matches. But Something Is Shifting.
Two wins from eight matches. Eighth on the points table. After five consecutive losses, back-to-back victories to close the first half of the season.
The Super Over against LSG was not just a result. It was a statement about what this team has in its belly when the game gets desperate. Rinku does not panic. Narine does not panic. When the lights are brightest and the margin is thinnest, KKR have shown twice now that they can hold their nerve.
KKR need to win most of their remaining six games to be safe. Five wins might still get them through on net run rate. It is tight. It is uncomfortable. But it is not over.
Today KKR travel to Hyderabad to face SRH, who are on a five-match winning streak and are perhaps the most dangerous team in the tournament right now. Head and Klaasen at the top are a nightmare for any bowling unit. And KKR’s death bowling, without Harshit Rana and with Pathirana only just finding his rhythm, remains the biggest question mark.
But I will be watching. I always will be.
Tell Me What You Think
Here is the question I want to leave you with this week.
Is the IPL losing its balance? Are we getting batting exhibitions instead of cricket matches? Or do you think the bowlers just need to be smarter, stronger, more inventive?
And what was your moment of the week? Rinku’s 83 not out followed by Narine’s Super Over masterclass? Rickelton’s 123 in a losing cause? The Delhi humiliation where the batting lineup that collapses for 75 early in the week and then chases 225 the next? Or Holder’s five-dismissal performance that reminded us what a complete fielding display looks like when someone actually takes their catches?
Drop your thoughts in the comments.
And to the KKR fans who have been suffering with me all season. Two wins. Six to go. We are not done yet.
If you missed last week’s blog, read it here.
Open any fashion app on your phone right now.
Go ahead. I will wait.
Chances are, within three seconds of opening it, something is flashing at you. A banner. A pop-up. A countdown timer. Forty percent off. Buy two get one. Flash sale ends tonight. Welcome, here is your ten percent off just for showing up.
I have been noticing this for a while now. Not just on one app. On almost every fashion brand’s app or website I open. The discount is not the exception anymore. The discount is the entire experience.
And every time I see it, I think the same thing.
If this brand is always running a sale, what is the actual price of anything they sell?
Here is what is really happening inside these businesses.
A fashion brand launches. They need customers fast. So they offer a welcome discount. Ten percent off your first order just for signing up. Sounds reasonable. It works. People sign up. People buy.
Then the first order ships and the customer gets a follow-up email. Another discount. Come back and get fifteen percent off your next purchase. Because we miss you. It has been three weeks.
Then there is a seasonal sale. Then a birthday sale. Then a clearance sale. Then another welcome offer because somehow the pop-up keeps showing up even for returning customers.
Before long, the brand has trained every single person in their customer base to do one thing.
Wait.
Just wait. Because the sale is always coming. Why would you ever pay full price when you know, with absolute certainty, that a discount code is either already live or just around the corner?
This is not a marketing strategy. This is a slow poison.
Let me show you what a twenty percent discount actually costs a fashion brand.
Imagine a kurta priced at Rs. 1,200. The cost of making it, shipping it, and acquiring the customer through ads is Rs. 900. At full price the brand makes Rs. 300. A twenty-five percent margin. Thin but workable if volume is good.
Now apply a twenty percent discount. The kurta sells for Rs. 960. The costs are still Rs. 900. The brand makes Rs. 60.
That is not a twenty percent reduction in profit. That is an eighty percent reduction in profit.
And this is before accounting for the customer who now believes the kurta is worth Rs. 960. Not Rs. 1,200. That belief does not go away. The next time you try to sell them something at full price, you are fighting a psychological anchor you set yourself.
You trained them. You told them your product was worth less. And now you are surprised they will not pay full price.
There is a fashion brand I used to admire. Good design. Strong identity. The kind of brand that felt like it had a point of view.
I remember the first time I opened their app and there was no sale on. Everything was full price. And somehow that made me want it more. The absence of a discount made the product feel valuable. Like it did not need to apologise for its price tag.
Then slowly the discounts started appearing. First seasonally. Then more frequently. Then permanently. Now I cannot remember the last time I opened that app and did not see a sale banner.
And here is the honest truth. I trust that brand less now. Not because the product changed. But because the pricing told me something about how they see their own product.
If they do not believe it is worth full price, why should I?
The brands that have built genuine equity in fashion do not compete on price. They compete on desire.
Instead of ten percent off, they offer early access. You are on the inner circle list. You get to see the new collection forty-eight hours before anyone else. No discount. Just the feeling of being chosen.
Instead of a flash sale, they do limited drops. Fifty pieces. Gone in hours. The scarcity is real. The urgency is real. And not a single rupee of margin is sacrificed.
Instead of a discount for crossing a cart value, they offer a gift with purchase. A small accessory. A branded pouch. Something that costs the brand very little but feels like a genuine bonus to the customer. Psychologically, a gift feels like a gain. A discount feels like an admission that you were overcharging to begin with.
These are not complicated strategies. They require discipline more than technology. The discipline to say: our product is worth what we say it is worth, and we are not going to apologise for that.
Shopify’s checkout tools today make all of this implementable without heavy custom development. Customer tagging for inner circle access. Dynamic gift triggers based on cart value. Limited inventory controls for drop mechanics. The infrastructure exists. What most brands lack is the conviction to use it.
The next time you are tempted to run a sitewide sale, ask yourself one question.
Am I doing this because it is good for my brand, or because I am scared that without it nobody will buy?
If the answer is the second one, the discount is not solving your problem. It is hiding it. The real problem is that you have not yet built enough reasons for people to want your product at full price. And no amount of discounting fixes that. It only makes it worse.
The fashion brands that will still be here in ten years are not the ones with the biggest sales. They are the ones that made you feel something when you paid full price.
Build that. Protect that. Do not discount that away.
This is the third blog in my series on building smarter D2C businesses. If you missed the first two, read about why your retailer margin is costing you more than you think here and why your ads might be lying to you here.
If you want to build a high margin Shopify store that does not depend on discounts to grow, we can help.
Last Sunday I was at the Shibpur burning ghat.
My aged uncle had passed away. The family had gathered. There was grief in the air, as there always is at such places. But alongside the grief, there was something else. A quiet, creeping shame.
The infrastructure at that burning ghat was pathetic. I will not dress it up in polite language. Pathetic is the right word. A facility that handles some of the most painful moments of people’s lives looked like it had not seen meaningful attention in decades.
I stood there and thought about my uncle. And then, almost involuntarily, I thought about Bengal.
What it was supposed to be. What it could have been. What it still could become.
And I felt that familiar ache that every Bengali who loves this city carries somewhere deep inside.
I Have Loved This City My Whole Life. Even When It Has Not Made It Easy.
I was born in December 1975.
When I was five years old, my father’s factory was locked down. Trade union strikes. The kind that were happening all over Bengal in those years. My father was not a wealthy man. He was a working man. And when the factory shut, everything shut with it.
I do not say this for sympathy. I say this because it is the truth of what many families in Bengal lived through, and many still live through today.
Getting food twice a day was a struggle in our home until I turned ten. In a city that was once called the cultural capital of India. In a state that had the infrastructure and the intellectual capital to lead this nation.
Like thousands of Bengali young men and women of my generation, I eventually left. Went to Bangalore for studies. Almost stayed. The city had jobs, opportunity, infrastructure that worked, a sense that things were moving forward.
I came back to Kolkata in 2006. A family emergency brought me back. But I made a choice to stay. To build here. And in 2013 I started Brainium in Salt Lake Sector V..
I do not regret that choice for a single day. But I know the cost of it. I know how painfully slow it is to get things done here. I know what poor infrastructure does to ambition. I know what it feels like to watch other cities grow at a pace that makes you quietly wonder why your own city is still not in the same conversation.
I Grew Up Watching Dr. Prannoy Roy On Television.
1989. Lok Sabha elections. A man sitting in a studio with graphs and numbers, predicting outcomes with a precision that felt almost magical to a fourteen-year-old watching at home.
I was hooked from that moment. Not on politics. On the numbers. On the data. On the idea that elections were not just about passion and noise but about patterns and trends and what they revealed about what people truly wanted.
I have loved election number crunching ever since. And with the West Bengal Assembly elections of 2026 heating up, with Kolkata going to polls on 29th, with the air full of promises and counter-promises and noise, I find myself going back to that same instinct.
Strip away the noise. Look at the numbers. Look at the facts. And ask the one question that actually matters.
Are we better off?
There Was A Man Who Had A Plan.
Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy was the Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1948 to 1962. He is rightly called the Architect of Modern Bengal.
Think about the context. Bengal had just been torn apart by Partition. Over thirty lakh refugees had poured in. The scars of famine were fresh. The economy was shattered. The social fabric was fraying at every edge.
And into this devastation stepped a man with a blueprint. Not a political blueprint. An engineering blueprint.
He built the Durgapur Steel Plant. He established the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works. He created Durgapur township and Kalyani as planned industrial cities where people could live, work, and study in one place. He established IIT Kharagpur in 1951 and IIM Calcutta in 1961. He expanded Calcutta Medical College, RG Kar, and NRS. He built the Durgapur Barrage. He worked with the Damodar Valley Corporation for flood control and power. He settled thirty lakh refugees with land, schools, and hospitals in areas like Jadavpur, Garia, and Netaji Nagar. He promoted free primary education when it was a radical idea.
He was a doctor. He thought about Bengal the way a doctor thinks about a patient. Diagnose the real problem. Treat the root cause. Build for the long term. Not for the next headline.
His most famous thought was simple: Remember, you are an Indian first.
He did not build for votes. He built for decades.
IIT Kharagpur stands today. IIM Calcutta stands today. Salt Lake City, which he envisioned to decongest Kolkata, stands today. I run my company from there.
He is the reason I have an address.
So What Happened?
I am not going to stand here and point fingers at any party. That is not what this blog is about.
But I am going to ask the question that the data asks.
Bengal was the industrial heartbeat of India at Independence. Today, when people talk about India’s growth story, about the cities driving the economy, about where the jobs are and where the startups are and where the infrastructure investment is flowing, Kolkata is rarely in that conversation.
The brain drain that I lived through personally is not an isolated story. It is a generational pattern. Our best and brightest leave. Some come back, like I did. Most do not.
The factories that my father worked in are largely gone. The industrial base that Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy built has not been replaced with something new. The infrastructure at a burning ghat in Shibpur on a Sunday afternoon in 2026 should not look the way it looked last weekend.
This is not how it was supposed to be.
This is not what he envisioned when he was building steel plants and planned cities and world-class institutions.
Something went wrong somewhere. And every Bengali who loves this state knows it, even if we do not always say it out loud.
But Here Is What I Also Know.
Bengal has everything it needs to be extraordinary.
The intellectual capital is unmatched. The culture runs deep. The hunger for education and achievement is real. I see it every day in the young people who work with me at Brainium. Brilliant, hungry, capable people who want to build something here.
The question is never whether Bengal can. The question is always whether Bengal will be given the conditions to.
Industrialisation. Real jobs. Infrastructure that works. A government that thinks in decades not in election cycles. Policies that invite investment rather than frighten it away. A quality of life that makes our young people want to stay rather than feel they have to leave.
That is not a political manifesto. That is just what every Bengali parent wants for their child.
29th April. Your Turn.
I grew up watching Dr. Prannoy Roy read the numbers on election night.
The numbers always tell you what the people wanted. And what the people want in Bengal, if you strip away all the noise, is simple.
They want to eat well. They want their children to study well. They want jobs that are real and growing. They want infrastructure that works. They want to build their lives here and not feel like leaving is the only option.
Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy understood that. He built for that.
On 29th April, you have a voice.
Do not stay home. Do not get cynical. Do not tell yourself that your vote does not matter.
Go out and vote. Vote for whatever future you believe in. Vote for the Bengal you want your children to grow up in. Vote for the city that should be spoken about in the same breath as Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad but somehow still is not.
We deserve better. Bengal deserves better.
And it starts with showing up.
Tell Me What You Think
Do you believe Bengal can reclaim its place as one of India’s great economic engines?
What do you think is the single biggest thing holding this state back?
Drop it in the comments. I want to have this conversation. Genuinely.
Yesterday afternoon at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi, Punjab Kings needed to chase 265 runs to win.
The forecasters had their win probability at 14.83% before the first ball of the second innings was bowled.
Prabhsimran Singh and Priyansh Arya walked out and hit 116 runs in the first six overs.
Then Shreyas Iyer came in, got dropped twice by the same fielder in successive overs, and hit sixes immediately after each dropped catch. Punjab Kings chased down 265 with six wickets and seven balls to spare. The highest successful chase in the history of T20 cricket. Ever. KL Rahul had scored an unbeaten 152 off 67 balls for DC, the first Indian to score 150 or more in IPL history. In any other week it would have been the only story. Yesterday it was the losing cause.
I have been watching cricket since 1983. I have never seen a week like this one.
Seven Days. Nine Matches. Records Everywhere.
Let me start where my heart is. Sunday April 19. Eden Gardens. KKR versus Rajasthan Royals.
I have been waiting for this blog entry for four weeks.
Rinku Singh. 53 not out off 34 balls. An unbeaten 76-run seventh-wicket stand with Anukul Roy. KKR chased down 156 with four wickets and two balls to spare. Their first win of the season.
I am not ashamed to tell you I let out a sound that my neighbours probably heard.
RR had been 81 for 0 at one point. Suryavanshi was blazing along at 46 off 28 balls. Then Varun Chakravarthy pulled his length back just enough. Suryavanshi went for it and found Ramandeep Singh stationed perfectly at the rope. Clean catch. The partnership was broken. KKR’s bowlers applied pressure. RR collapsed from that platform to finish at 155 for 9.
And then KKR’s top order did what KKR’s top order has been doing all season. They wobbled. 85 for 6. The old panic started to rise in my chest.
But Rinku Singh does not panic. Rinku Singh never panics.
He hooked a short ball magnificently over fine leg for the winning six. Pure emotion. Pure relief. The whole of Eden Gardens on its feet.
Matheesha Pathirana had also officially joined the squad that morning, finally clearing his NOC from Sri Lanka Cricket. Even the timing of his arrival felt like something shifting.
Also on April 19, Punjab Kings posted 254 for 7 and demolished LSG in Mullanpur. Priyansh Arya and Cooper Connolly put on an unforgettable 182-run partnership for the second wicket in just 13.2 overs. The 11th and 12th overs alone yielded 37 runs. The 13th over against Aiden Markram went for 32. LSG never came close.
Monday April 20. Ahmedabad. GT versus MI. And Tilak Varma.
Kagiso Rabada ripped through the MI top order in the powerplay, taking 3 for 33. MI were in real trouble. Then Tilak Varma and Naman Dhir built a partnership. Dhir made 45. Tilak made 101 not out off 45 balls. Eight boundaries. Seven sixes. Strike rate of 224. His first IPL century. Against a bowling attack that had just embarrassed his team’s top order.
MI posted 199. Bumrah took a first-ball wicket when GT chased. GT were bowled out for 100. MI won by 99 runs.
Tuesday April 21. Hyderabad. SRH versus DC. And Abhishek Sharma produced one of the great individual innings of this IPL.
Abhishek Sharma scored an unbeaten 135 off 68 balls. Ten fours. Ten sixes. SRH posted 242. Eshan Malinga took 4 for 32. DC fell 47 runs short.
An unbeaten 135. And that innings will still be the second or third conversation when people talk about this week.
Wednesday April 22. Lucknow. LSG versus RR. A low-scoring match by this week’s extraordinary standards, but no less dramatic for it.
RR were in tatters at 32 for 3 inside four overs. Mohammed Shami had removed Jaiswal and Jurel. Mohsin Khan got rid of Suryavanshi who made just 8. The teenage sensation who had been unstoppable suddenly looked very human on a seaming, swinging surface.
Into this chaos walked Ravindra Jadeja. Calm. Unhurried. He batted with a revised total in mind and did not take a risk until the last two overs. Between overs 12 and 18 RR hit just three boundaries. Then Jadeja found his range, ransacking 20 off Mayank Yadav’s final over. He finished unbeaten on 43 off 29 balls, pushing RR to 159 for 6.
Jofra Archer then took 3 for 20. Nandre Burger and Brijesh Sharma picked up two wickets each. LSG were bowled out for 119. RR won by 40 runs.
Jadeja was the man of the match. He dedicated it to his wife, the education minister of Gujarat. Only Jadeja.
Thursday April 23. Wankhede Stadium. MI versus CSK. And Sanju Samson scored his second century of the IPL season.
Samson finished unbeaten on 101 off 54 balls. Ten boundaries. Six sixes. CSK posted 207 for 6. Akeal Hosein, introduced as the impact player, then took 4 for 17 and MI were dismissed for 104. CSK won by 103 runs. Their biggest margin of victory in their entire IPL history.
When Samson brought up his century, Bumrah, Hardik and Suryakumar Yadav all came over to congratulate him. In the CSK dressing room, Steven Fleming pulled him into a bear hug.
Two centuries in seven innings for his new franchise. Nobody has made more. The man who came to CSK with question marks hanging over his head is now the most dangerous batter in this tournament.
Friday April 24. Chinnaswamy. RCB versus GT. And Virat Kohli reminded everyone he is still the best chaser in the game. Sai Sudharsan had scored a magnificent 100 off 58 balls for GT, becoming the fastest player to reach 2000 IPL runs. GT posted 205. Kohli then scored 81 off 44 balls and Padikkal made 55 as RCB chased it down by five wickets.
Five centuries in five days. And the week was not finished.
Saturday April 25. Two matches. And the day cricket lost its mind completely.
The first match, DC versus PBKS. I have already told you that story above. KL Rahul’s unbeaten 152 that nobody will remember. The highest successful chase in T20 history. A day that rewrote the record books entirely.
The second match, RR versus SRH in Jaipur. And Suryavanshi scored his second century of IPL 2026.
103 off 37 balls. He reached his century off just 36 balls. He now has the second and third-quickest centuries in the history of the entire IPL. He is 15 years old.
But SRH chased down 229 anyway. Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan firing at the top of the order, both teams combining to put down seven chances in a match that was as chaotic as it was brilliant. Even a Suryavanshi century was not enough on this evening.
The Week That Rewrote Everything
Five individual centuries in one week. The highest successful T20 chase ever. KL Rahul’s unbeaten 152 ending on the losing side. Tilak Varma’s first IPL hundred. Abhishek Sharma’s unbeaten 135 that felt like old news by Friday.
There was a time when 200 was a fortress in T20 cricket. This week, 264 was not enough. Let that land for a moment.
The game has changed. It has changed at the pace of a Prabhsimran Singh cover drive in the first six overs.
And KKR. Finally. Something To Smile About.
Rinku’s 53 not out. Anukul’s calm 29. A win at Eden Gardens. Our first of the season.
It is not enough. We know that. One win from seven games still leaves KKR in serious trouble. The bowling combinations still need answers. The top-order fragility is still very real. But Pathirana being available changes at least one thing.
Last Sunday night, for the first time this season, I went to sleep smiling.
In a week full of records, centuries, and history being made every other evening, that simple feeling of watching Rinku hit that winning six was still the best moment of my week.
Sometimes, after weeks of heartbreak, a win is everything.
Tell Me What You Think
What was your moment of the week?
KL Rahul’s 152 that nobody will talk about? Suryavanshi’s 103 off 37 balls at 15? PBKS chasing 265 and making it look almost routine? Tilak Varma’s hundred that turned a 99-run win? Or Sanju Samson with his second century of the season at Wankhede?
And KKR fans. Tell me. Did you also let out that sound when Rinku hit that winning six at Eden Gardens?
If you missed last week’s blog, read it here.