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.
I met them at a networking event a few weeks ago.
A young couple running a fashion brand. Sharp eye for design. Passionate about their product. The kind of founders who know exactly what they are making and exactly who they are making it for.
We got talking. And somewhere between the second cup of chai and the background noise of the room, they told me something that stopped me mid-sip.
Their sales were growing. Good months, consistently. Customers coming back. Word of mouth picking up. All the signs of a brand finding its feet.
But their ad platform was telling them the opposite.
Declining conversions. Campaigns that looked like they were dying. Numbers that made no sense when they looked at their actual bank account.
So they did what any sensible founder would do. They started cutting ad budgets. Pausing campaigns. Second-guessing every decision.
They were about to slow down a machine that was actually working. Because the dashboard was lying to them.
I asked them one question.
Have you ever heard of server-side tracking?
The blank look told me everything I needed to know.
The Dashboard That Lies
Here is what was actually happening to this couple’s business. And if you run a D2C brand in 2026, there is a real chance it is happening to yours too.
When you run ads on Meta or Google, those platforms track your results using something called a pixel. A small piece of code that sits on your website, watches what your customers do, and reports back to the ad platform.
The problem is that this pixel lives in the customer’s browser. And the customer’s browser in 2026 is a very hostile place for that pixel to live.
Ad blockers kill it. Apple’s privacy settings quietly strangle it. Slow mobile connections cause it to simply not fire at all. And even when it does fire, the cookie it leaves behind often expires within 24 hours. If your customer sees your ad on Monday and buys on Friday, that sale simply disappears from your attribution data. The platform never connects the dots. It thinks the campaign failed. It tells you to stop spending.
Meanwhile your actual business is doing fine.
This is what was happening to my new friends at that networking event. Their sales were real. Their growth was real. But their data was broken. And broken data was about to make them break something that did not need fixing.
The Fix Is Simpler Than It Sounds
Server-side tracking moves the entire conversation away from the customer’s browser. Instead of the pixel trying to survive on the customer’s device, your own server talks directly to Meta or Google. Browser to server. Clean signal. Complete data. Nothing gets blocked. Nothing gets lost.
Every purchase recorded. Every add-to-cart captured. Every customer journey stitched together properly, even if it spans seven days and four devices.
What this does to your business is transformative.
Your ad platform suddenly has accurate data to work with. Its algorithm stops making decisions in the dark. It starts finding the right customers more efficiently. Your cost of acquisition comes down not because you spent less but because the machine finally knows what it is doing.
And that 5:1 LTV to CAC ratio we talked about in the last blog? You cannot even calculate it properly if your tracking is broken. You are essentially flying a plane with a broken altimeter and wondering why you keep nearly crashing.
What I Told Them
I did not give them a technical lecture at that networking event. That would have been the wrong thing to do.
What I told them was simple.
You know your product. You know your customer. You know your numbers. What you do not know is what is happening in the background between your customer and your ad platform. And that gap, that invisible layer between your business and your data, is costing you money and causing you unnecessary panic.
They were relieved more than anything else. The confusion that had been building for months suddenly made sense. The campaigns they had been about to shut down were not failing. They were simply invisible.
We started working together after that conversation.
And the first thing we did was fix the tracking.
Everything else became clearer after that.
The Question To Ask Yourself
If your sales are growing but your ad platform is showing declining conversions, do not panic. And do not cut your budgets.
Ask yourself one question first.
Is my tracking set up to capture the full picture? Or is it leaving half the story on the table?
Because in 2026, the brands that win are not necessarily the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They are the ones with the clearest data. The ones who know exactly what is working, what is not, and why.
The ones who stopped guessing.
This is the second blog in a series I am writing on building a smarter D2C business. If you missed the first one on why your retailer margin is costing you far more than you think, read it here.
If you want to find out whether your tracking is leaking revenue, we can help you audit it.
There is a moment in cricket that stays with you.
Not a six. Not a screaming yorker. Not even a last-ball finish.
It is a golden duck. An over. Three wickets. Gone.
On April 13 in Hyderabad, a 24-year-old fast bowler from Nagpur called Praful Hinge was given the unenviable job of opening the bowling on his IPL debut against Rajasthan Royals’ intimidating pair of Vaibhav Suryavanshi and Yashasvi Jaiswal.
SRH bought him for Rs. 30 lakh. Nobody outside hardcore domestic cricket followers knew his name.
He dismissed Suryavanshi on the very first ball. Then Dhruv Jurel. Then Lhuan-dre Pretorius. Three wickets in one over. The first bowler in the history of the IPL to take three wickets in the opening over of an innings. He then dismissed Riyan Parag in his next over to finish with 4 for 18.
His father had pushed him into fast bowling when he initially preferred batting. He fixed an illegal bowling action early in his career. He trained at the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai and at a high-performance camp in Brisbane. He idolises Pat Cummins and had actually manifested this moment. He had written it down somewhere that his first IPL match he would take four or five wickets.
Rs. 30 lakh. First ball of his IPL career. Suryavanshi gone for a golden duck.
But Hinge was only half the story that night.
Sakib Hussain is 21 years old. He comes from Gopalganj, Bihar. His father was a farmer and daily-wage labourer. The family lived an “earn today, eat today” existence. Cricket was never the original plan. He wanted to join the Indian Army.
He was picked up by KKR in the 2024 auction for Rs. 20 lakh, was part of their title-winning squad without playing a single game. He went unsold at the 2025 auction. He went back to domestic cricket, trained harder, took a stunning 6 for 41 against Arunachal Pradesh in the Ranji Trophy, and SRH picked him up for Rs. 30 lakh in 2026.
On debut against RR, Sakib took 4 for 24. He dismissed Yashasvi Jaiswal with his first wicket and came back in the 15th over to remove Donovan Ferreira when he was threatening to win the game for RR. The joint-best bowling figures by an Indian on IPL debut.
Two debutants. Rs. 60 lakh between them. Eight wickets shared. RR bowled out for 159 as SRH won by 57 runs.
The boy who had been terrorising every bowling attack in this IPL. The teenager with the 15-ball fifties and the 78 off 26. Out. First ball. Golden duck. To a man earning Rs. 30 lakh on his first day in IPL cricket.
That is not just a cricket story. That is India’s story.
Seven Days. Nine Matches. So Much Happened.
Let me take you through the rest of the week.
Saturday April 12 gave us a double-header and the second match at Wankhede was the one everyone was talking about the next morning.
RCB posted 240 for 4. Phil Salt was breathtaking. Patidar smashed three consecutive sixes to start his innings. Rohit Sharma retired hurt on 19 with a hamstring issue. And then came Sherfane Rutherford in the death overs for MI. The powerful left-hander blasted an unbeaten 71 off just 31 balls, hitting 9 sixes into the Mumbai night sky. Even in defeat, that innings was something to behold. RCB won by 18 runs but Rutherford deserved a standing ovation.
The first match that Saturday, LSG versus GT in Lucknow, was more straightforward. Prasidh Krishna took 4 for 28 to restrict LSG to 164. Shubman Gill and Jos Buttler put on 85 together to chase it down with ease. GT quietly on the move. Nobody talking about them. That is exactly when teams become dangerous.
Then came Monday April 13. Hyderabad. The Hinge and Sakib night I opened this blog with.
Tuesday April 14. Chepauk. CSK versus KKR.
I need a moment here.
I have been a KKR fan since 2008. I have seen bad years. I have lived through the dark seasons where we finished bottom half and I still believed. Next year will be different, I told myself every time.
CSK posted 192. KKR chased and managed only 160. Lost by 32 runs. Noor Ahmad ran through the middle order and KKR lost four wickets for just 14 runs in four overs. Five losses in six games. Still without a win. The only point we have came courtesy of rain.
Wednesday April 15. RCB versus LSG at Chinnaswamy. Young Rasikh Salam Dar took four wickets and Bhuvneshwar Kumar took three as LSG were bowled out for 146. RCB chased it with five overs to spare. Clinical. Ruthless. RCB continue to look like champions defending their title.
Thursday April 16. Wankhede. MI versus PBKS. Rohit missing with that hamstring. Quinton de Kock, promoted up the order, scored an unbeaten 112 off 60 balls to drag MI to 195 from 12 for 2. A magnificent innings. The kind you frame on a wall.
PBKS chased it like they were going for a morning walk. Prabhsimran Singh scored 80 not out off 39 balls. Shreyas Iyer scored 66 off 35. They got there in 16.3 overs with 7 wickets in hand. Against Bumrah. At Wankhede. PBKS simply do not know how to lose.
Friday April 17. Ahmedabad. GT versus KKR.
Cameron Green finally showed his class with 79 off 55 balls. But KKR posted only 180 after losing three wickets in the first four overs. Shubman Gill then scored 86 off 50 and made the chase look like a net session. GT won by five wickets.
Six losses. One rain point. Sitting at the bottom of the table. I do not know how to feel anymore. I truly do not.
Saturday April 18 gave us a double-header to close the week. And David Miller finally buried his ghosts.
Remember that gut-wrenching DC versus GT match a fortnight ago? Where Miller needed 2 off the final ball and missed? Where Buttler ran out his partner and GT won by one run?
Last evening at Chinnaswamy, DC were chasing RCB’s 175 and needed 15 off the final over bowled by Romario Shepherd. Miller walked across and smashed two sixes and a boundary. DC won by 6 wickets with one ball to spare.
KL Rahul scored 57 and Tristan Stubbs made an anchoring 60 to set it up. Miller just finished it.
Cricket gives redemption. Slowly. Painfully. But it gives it.
The second match that evening in Hyderabad, Abhishek Sharma blazed a fifty and SRH beat CSK by 10 runs. CSK’s playoff hopes are now under genuine pressure.
Where Things Stand
PBKS and RCB are the real deal this season. Both have batting depth, bowling options, and genuine belief. The race between them for the top spot will define the second half of the league stage.
RR have had their first stumble. Suryavanshi will bounce back. He is 15. He has nothing to be afraid of. But that Hinge and Sakib night was a reminder that this tournament humbles everyone eventually.
And KKR.
Six games. One point. Bottom of the table.
Today is KKR versus RR at Eden Gardens. A home game. Our ground. Our crowd.
I want to believe. I always do.
But this KKR needs to find something urgently. A win. Any win. Before the season disappears completely.
Tell Me What You Think
What was your moment of this week?
Hinge’s golden duck first ball? Sakib’s 4 for 24 on debut? Rutherford’s 9-six blitz in a losing cause? Or Miller’s redemption at Chinnaswamy?
And fellow KKR fans. Tell me honestly. Are you still believing? Because I am trying very hard to.
Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.
If you missed last week’s blog, read it here.
A few weeks ago I was on a call with a founder.
Smart person. Passionate about the product. Running a niche FMCG business that genuinely deserved to be bigger than it was. Selling through offline retailers and on Amazon and Flipkart. Decent volumes. Growing steadily.
I asked him if he had thought about building his own online store.
There was a pause.
Then he said something that I have been thinking about ever since.
“Sourav, if I go direct, what will my retailers think?”
I understood the fear immediately. Retailers are relationships. They are people you have built trust with over years. You do not want to upset them. You do not want to be seen as going behind their back. In India especially, that relationship feels sacred. You protect it.
But here is what I wanted to tell him. And what I am going to tell you today.
That fear is costing you far more than you realise.
The Margin You See. And The Margin You Don’t.
When you sell through a retailer, you see the margin you give away very clearly. It is right there on the invoice. You know exactly what you charged the retailer and what the product will sell for on the shelf. That gap is visible. Painful sometimes, but visible.
When you sell on Amazon or Flipkart, same thing. The platform fee, the fulfilment cost, the advertising spend to get discovered. All visible. All accounted for.
What you do not see is the invisible cost.
Every time a customer buys your product from a retailer or a marketplace, that customer belongs to the platform. Not to you. Amazon knows who bought your product. Flipkart knows. Your retailer has a relationship with the customer who walks into their shop. You have none of that.
So the next time that customer wants to buy your product again, what happens?
They go back to Amazon. They search. Maybe they find you. Maybe they find your competitor who is spending more on ads that day. Maybe Amazon’s algorithm has changed and you are now on page two. Maybe there is a new brand with a lower price point sitting right above you.
You have to win that customer all over again. Every single time. At full acquisition cost.
That is the invisible tax. And it compounds every month.
The Math That Changes Everything.
There is a concept in the D2C world called the LTV to CAC ratio. LTV is the total revenue a customer generates over their lifetime with your brand. CAC is what it costs you to acquire that customer in the first place.
For years the rule of thumb was 3:1. Spend one rupee acquiring a customer, earn three rupees back over time. That was considered healthy.
In 2026, with platform costs rising, ad costs volatile, and competition for attention more expensive than ever, 3:1 barely keeps the lights on. The brands that are genuinely building something are targeting 5:1 and beyond.
The difference between 3:1 and 5:1 is not just a harder target. It is a completely different way of thinking about your customer.
At 3:1 you are a marketing-led business. You spend to acquire. You hope they come back. You spend again when they don’t.
At 5:1 you own the relationship. You know who your customer is. You know what they bought, when they bought it, and when they are likely to need it again. You talk to them directly. You bring them back at almost zero cost. Your LTV grows without your CAC growing with it.
That is the power of owning your customer.
What I Told The Founder.
I did not tell him to abandon his retailers. That would be naive and frankly bad advice. Retailer relationships have real value, especially in FMCG where shelf presence and local trust matter enormously.
What I told him was this.
Your retailers give you distribution. But they cannot give you data. They cannot give you a direct relationship with the person who uses your product every day. They cannot tell you why someone tried your product once and never came back. They cannot help you build a community around what you are making.
A D2C store does not replace your retailers. It gives you something your retailers cannot. It gives you the customer.
When someone buys directly from your store, you know their name. You have their email. You know what they bought and when. You can send them a personalised message three weeks later. You can tell them about a new variant. You can ask them how they liked it. You can bring them back for a fraction of the cost of finding a new customer.
Over time that relationship is worth multiples of what you earn from a single transaction.
He listened. He asked questions. By the end of the call he was willing to explore.
That was enough for me.
The Real Question.
If you are a founder selling through retailers or marketplaces, I am not asking you to burn those relationships.
I am asking you one question.
Do you know who your customer is?
Not approximately. Not the demographic your retailer serves. The actual person who picks up your product, uses it, and decides whether to come back or not.
If the answer is no, you are building a business on borrowed ground. The platform owns the relationship. You own the product. And every time that customer comes back, you are paying to reach them all over again.
That is not growth. That is a treadmill.
The founders who figure this out early are the ones who build something that lasts. The ones who don’t will keep growing their revenue while wondering why the margins never improve.
Your retailers are not your enemy. But they are not your moat either.
Your customer is your moat. Go own them.
If you are thinking about building your own D2C store, we can help you get started.
Yesterday night I watched Sanju Samson walk out to bat for CSK against Delhi Capitals at Chepauk.
Three games into his CSK career. Scores of 6, 7 and 9. The boos had not started yet but the murmurs had. People were beginning to question the trade. Whether leaving Rajasthan Royals made sense. Whether the pressure of a new franchise had gotten to him.
I have watched Sanju bat for many years now. I know what he looks like when he is troubled. And I know what he looks like when he has made up his mind.
Yesterday, he had made up his mind.
He took Mukesh Kumar for consecutive fours in the first over. He launched Kuldeep Yadav for a six over extra cover. CSK raced to 62 in the powerplay. He never looked back. He finished on an unbeaten 115 off 56 balls.
IPL 2026 had its first centurion. And he chose the perfect night to do it.
CSK won by 23 runs. Jamie Overton took 4 for 18. First points of the season. The relief was written all over Ruturaj Gaikwad’s face at the end.
Never doubt Sanju Samson. He always answers. Eventually.
Seven Days. Nine Matches. Where Do I Even Begin.
April 5 started with a double-header.
The first match in Hyderabad. SRH versus LSG. Mohammed Shami dismantled the SRH top order, removing Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head cheaply to leave them reeling at 26 for 4 after eight overs. From there, Klaasen and Nitish Kumar Reddy rescued SRH with a 116-run fifth-wicket partnership in 63 balls, the highest for SRH in IPL history, to get them to 156.
Still not enough. Rishabh Pant stayed calm through LSG’s middle-order wobble and finished the chase with three boundaries off the last over, winning it with one ball to spare. Classic Pant. Makes it look impossible until the very last moment, then makes it look easy.
The second match that evening at Chinnaswamy. RCB versus CSK. And RCB were simply brutal. Tim David scored 70 not out off 25 balls with 8 sixes. Patidar smashed 48 off 19. RCB posted 250 for 3, the highest ever by any team against CSK in IPL history. CSK were bowled out for 207 and lost by 43 runs, their third consecutive defeat.
CSK looked broken after that evening. They were not. But we did not know that yet.
April 6. Eden Gardens. My team. My city. And the rain.
KKR were 25 for 2 in 3.4 overs when the match was abandoned. Xavier Bartlett had already removed Finn Allen and Cameron Green. Both teams took a point.
So KKR’s first point of the season came courtesy of a Kolkata thunderstorm. SRK appeared on the balcony and waved to the crowd. That was the highlight of the evening. I will say no more.
April 7 in Guwahati. Rain again, this time cutting the match to 11 overs a side. But shorter did not mean quieter.
Suryavanshi and Jaiswal put on an 80-run opening stand. Suryavanshi scored 39. Jaiswal finished unbeaten on 77 off 32 balls. RR posted 150 for 3 and bowled MI out to win by 27 runs. Bumrah bowled. Suryavanshi hit him anyway. Jaiswal said after the game that watching Suryavanshi take on Bumrah in the first over released the pressure for the whole team. That sentence tells you everything about what this 15-year-old is doing to opposition bowlers’ minds.
April 8. Delhi. DC versus GT. The first real last-ball finish of the week.
GT posted 210. KL Rahul scored 92 off 52 for DC. David Miller, facing his former side, brought the equation down to 2 needed off the final ball. He missed. Jos Buttler ran out Kuldeep Yadav attempting a desperate bye. GT won by 1 run.
One run. The cruelty of this game. Rahul deserved a winning side that night. He did not get one.
April 9. Eden Gardens again. KKR versus LSG. And the most painful kind of loss.
KKR posted 181. LSG were 104 for 5. Mukul Choudhary walked in and scored 54 off 27 balls with seven sixes. He and Avesh Khan added 54 for the eighth wicket. With one needed off the final ball, Choudhary swung, missed, ran through. Raghuvanshi’s throw missed the stumps. LSG won by three wickets.
I turned off the television at that point. I could not watch the celebrations.
KKR posted 181 and it should have been enough. But the death bowling fell apart completely in those final four overs. With no Harshit Rana and Pathirana still unavailable, the lack of experienced death bowling options showed badly when it mattered most. When a team has no genuine pace threat at the death, lower-order batters like Choudhary start looking like match-winners. And that is exactly what happened.
The hard truth is this. Without Harshit Rana and Pathirana, KKR have no reliable death bowling identity. Sunil Narine at 37 may genuinely be their best option in those final overs. That is not a plan. That is a prayer.
April 10 in Guwahati. RR versus the defending champions RCB. And Suryavanshi again. This time against the best bowling attack in the tournament.
RCB posted 201. Suryavanshi came out and scored 78 off 26 balls, with 7 sixes and 8 fours, reaching his fifty off just 15 balls. Dhruv Jurel followed with an unbeaten 81 off 43 balls. RR chased 202 with two overs to spare. RCB’s first loss of the season. RR’s fourth consecutive win. Suryavanshi now leads the Orange Cap with 200 runs in four matches at a strike rate of 266.
After the match, Virat Kohli sent him a personal message of appreciation. When Kohli reaches out to you specifically, you know you have done something truly special.
April 11 gave us a double-header to close the week. First, SRH blazed to 105 for 0 in the powerplay, the third-highest powerplay total in IPL history, with Abhishek Sharma smashing 74 off 28 balls. They were looking at 240. Shashank Singh took two wickets in one over and stopped the charge. SRH managed 219. PBKS chased it down with 7 balls to spare, with Shreyas Iyer finishing unbeaten on 69 off 33.
And then the final match of the week. Sanju’s night. The century. The first points for CSK. The feeling that a team has finally found its feet.
Where Things Stand After Two Weeks
Rajasthan Royals are the team of the tournament. Four wins from four. A 15-year-old who produces a match-winning performance every single time he walks in. A captain in Riyan Parag who backs his instincts. The RR bowling has wobbled a couple of times but the batting has always covered for it.
Punjab Kings are quietly doing something special too. Unbeaten in four games. Three wins and an abandonment that felt like a robbery for them at Eden Gardens.
CSK have woken up. One big performance can do that to a team. Watch them from here.
And KKR. Three losses, one rain point. Next up is CSK at Chepauk on Tuesday the 14th. Away game. Desperate for a win.
I want to believe. I always do. But this team needs answers urgently. The bowling combinations, the death overs, the inability to close out tight games. Something needs to change before it is too late.
Tell Me What You Think
What was your moment of Week 2?
Sanju’s 115? Suryavanshi’s 78 off 26 against the champions? GT winning by 1 run in Delhi? Or Mukul Choudhary appearing from nowhere to steal the game at Eden Gardens on the last ball?
Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.
And if you are a KKR fan, you know where I am. Let us hope Tuesday finally brings some good news.
Let me ask you something.
When was the last time you were genuinely surprised by what AI could do?
Not impressed. Not curious. Actually surprised. The kind of surprise that makes you sit back and think: wait, that changes things.
For most people, that moment was sometime in late 2022 or early 2023. ChatGPT arrived. You typed a question and got a brilliant answer. You asked it to write something and it wrote something good. You showed it to a colleague and they were amazed.
That feeling was real. That moment was real.
But that version of AI? It is already old.
AI Version 1.0: The Very Smart Assistant
Think about what that first wave of AI actually was.
It was a tool that waited.
You opened it. You typed something. It responded. You read the response. You decided what to do next. You closed it and went back to your work.
It was extraordinary. But it was still passive. It sat there, quietly, until you needed it. Like a very knowledgeable colleague who only speaks when spoken to.
Search got smarter. Writing got faster. Customer support got cheaper. Code got easier to write. Entire categories of work got compressed into minutes.
All of that is real. All of that matters.
But here is what that version of AI could not do.
It could not watch.
It could not notice.
It could not act on your behalf while you were doing something else entirely.
You always had to be in the loop. You were always the one making the final call. AI made you faster and sharper, but you were still the engine. AI was just the fuel.
That is Version 1.0.
Something Fundamental Just Shifted.
Agentic AI is not an upgrade to the AI you already know.
It is a completely different idea.
The old AI answered your questions. Agentic AI watches your world continuously, reasons about what is happening, makes a decision, and acts. Without waiting for you to ask. Without needing you to be in the room.
Think about what that actually means.
A system that monitors 47 data points simultaneously. That notices a pattern forming. That cross-references it against a rule you set six months ago. That executes a response in the next 60 seconds. And sends you a message telling you what it did and why.
You wake up in the morning and your AI agent has already done three things on your behalf overnight.
That is not a smarter chatbot. That is a different category of technology entirely.
The shift is this: AI moved from being a tool you use to being a system that works for you.
There is a word for what that creates. Autonomy. And autonomy at scale is what every business has been trying to buy for the last hundred years.
Let Me Show You What This Looks Like In The Real World.
There is a problem hiding inside every large jewellery retailer in India.
It is not visible on the balance sheet. It does not show up in the monthly P&L in an obvious way. But it is there, leaking, every single day.
Gold prices move in milliseconds. The MCX ticker updates continuously. The global LBMA benchmark shifts with every dollar move. The USD/INR rate adds another layer of complexity on top of that.
And in the middle of all this movement sits a CFO, looking at three different screens.
Screen one: live commodity prices. Screen two: the ERP system, batch-synced and hours behind reality. Screen three: a global price feed that speaks a different language from the local market data.
Nobody built a bridge between these three screens. So a human being became the bridge. And every time a human being is the bridge between a moving market and a business decision, margin leaks through the gap.
At the scale of a retailer operating 150 plus locations across India, that gap is not small. It is crores. Every year. Silently.
This is exactly the kind of problem that Agentic AI was built for.
What We Are Building At Brainium.
At Brainium, we are in the middle of building something we are calling Project Aurum-i.
It is an agentic middleware. Not a dashboard. Not a report. Not another screen for the CFO to stare at.
A system that ingests three live data streams simultaneously: global gold prices, domestic MCX futures, and real-time USD/INR rates. It normalises all three into a single number: landed cost per gram in INR, updated continuously.
Every time a sale happens anywhere in the retail network, the system registers the unhedged position automatically. It tracks the gap between what has been sold and what has been repurchased. In real time.
And then the agent takes over.
When the unhedged position crosses a threshold and the current price is below the 20-day moving average, the system does not send a report. It does not schedule a meeting. It fires a hedge recommendation directly to the CFO’s phone via WhatsApp. With the reasoning. With the numbers. Ready to act on immediately.
The entire POC runs for under Rs. 3,500 a month.
That is the economics of agentic AI right now. The cost of building it is almost nothing. The value it protects is crores.
We are not talking about AI in the abstract at Brainium. We are building it, right now, for one of the most complex and high-stakes environments in Indian retail.
The Question I Want To Leave You With.
Every business has a version of the three-screen problem.
Three systems that do not talk to each other. A human being acting as the bridge. Margin, time, or opportunity leaking through the gap every single day.
You have probably normalised it. It has been there so long it feels like just the way things work.
Agentic AI exists to replace that human bridge with something that never sleeps, never gets distracted, and never misses the signal.
The question is not whether this technology is ready. It is ready.
The question is: which gap in your business are you going to close first?
If you are thinking about that question seriously, I would love to have that conversation. Drop a comment below or connect with me directly. Let us talk.
Last night, I was barely breathing.
Tushar Deshpande. Final over. Gujarat Titans needing 11 runs. Kagiso Rabada on strike. Rashid Khan at the other end. The entire Narendra Modi Stadium on its feet.
I was sitting at home, and I was still nervous.
That is what IPL does to you. Every single year. It pulls you in. It grabs you by the collar. And it does not let go until the last ball is bowled.
Deshpande bowled six consecutive deliveries on the blockhole and wide yorker length. Rabada and Rashid could only manage 4 runs. RR won by 6. Pure nerve. Pure drama.
Welcome back, IPL. I have missed you.
Eight Days. Nine Matches. One Theme.
It started on March 28 with Virat Kohli doing what Virat Kohli does.
Defending champions RCB were chasing 202 against Sunrisers Hyderabad. Kohli scored 69 not out. Devdutt Padikkal smashed 61. They got there in 15.4 overs. A title defense that began exactly like a champion would want it to.
Then came Rohit Sharma, reminding the world that age is just a number people use when they have run out of better arguments.
MI were chasing 221 against KKR. Rohit smashed 78 off 38 balls with six sixes, helping MI pull off a final-over victory. 38 years old. Absolutely no signs of slowing down. That knock had the whole country talking the next morning.
And then a 15-year-old walked in and made everyone forget about Rohit.
Vaibhav Suryavanshi scored 52 off 17 balls against CSK. His fifty came in just 15 balls. The joint-third fastest fifty in IPL history. Strike rate of 305.88. Think about that for a second. He was not born when the IPL began in 2008. He does not know what nerves look like. He just walks in, clears his front leg, and hits it over the stands.
His post-match reaction? “They just said play your natural game. That’s what I did.”
That calmness is terrifying. In the best possible way.
RR chased down CSK’s 127 in just 12.1 overs. Eight wickets to spare. And CSK had a nightmare of their own. Sanju Samson, making his debut for his new team against his old one, got out for just 2. Cricket really has no sense of occasion.
Then came Cooper Connolly. An Australian nobody had heard of before March 31.
PBKS were 118 for 6 chasing a target of 163. Connolly walked in and scored 72 not out off 44 balls to win the match for his team. Just like that. First IPL game. Biggest moment of the chase. Completely unfazed.
Then Sameer Rizvi of Delhi. DC were in tatters at 26 for 4. Rizvi came in and scored 70 not out off 47 balls, winning the match almost single-handedly.
Unknown players. Big moments. Calm heads.
That is the theme of Week 1. Youth is not waiting for permission anymore.
And then last night, Dhruv Jurel scored a career-best 75 off 42 balls, Ravi Bishnoi ripped through GT’s middle order with 4 for 41, and Deshpande finished it off in the final over in the first real thriller of IPL 2026.
Eight days in. The tournament is already delivering.
Now Let Me Talk About KKR. Because I Have To.
I have supported this team since 2008. The bad years, the rebuilds, the heartbreaks, the three titles. 2024 felt like the start of something really special.
Right now, I am worried.
Harshit Rana is out for the entire season. Knee ligament injury from the T20 World Cup warm-up. Matheesh Pathirana, bought for Rs. 18 crore, is still not cleared by Sri Lanka Cricket. Cameron Green, the most expensive overseas buy in IPL history at Rs. 25.20 crore, is available only as a batter right now due to workload restrictions.
Three pacers. All unavailable or restricted. That is not bad luck. That is a crisis.
And Varun Chakravarthy, who I was counting on to be the difference-maker this season, is struggling for form and confidence after a difficult T20 World Cup where batters figured him out and hit him hard.
Two games played. Two losses. The batting has runs. The bowling has questions.
April 6, KKR host PBKS at Eden Gardens. The crowd will be loud. I will be watching. But honestly, something needs to change in how they are approaching their bowling combinations. This cannot continue.
So Where Does Week 2 Take Us?
CSK have 0 points from 2 games. So do KKR. Both proud franchises. Both under pressure already.
RR, PBKS, and DC are sitting pretty at the top. The Rajasthan Royals in particular look scary. That opening pair of Jaiswal and Suryavanshi has already put on 510 runs in partnership across IPL matches, needing only 246 balls between them. That is not an opening pair. That is a wrecking ball.
Today SRH face LSG. RCB face CSK. Both matches promise a lot.
The season has just started. And it already feels like there is no room to breathe.
That is exactly how IPL should feel.
Tell Me What You Think
Which moment of Week 1 had you on your feet?
Was it Rohit’s 78? Vaibhav’s 15-ball fifty? Connolly appearing from nowhere? Or last night’s final over at Ahmedabad?
And if you are a KKR fan like me, tell me honestly. Worried or not?
Drop your answer in the comments below. I read every single one. Always have.