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Going electric in the Indian kitchen
For decades, the Indian kitchen has been shaped by two realities: the wide availability of poorly paid domestic help or toiling homemakers, and the cultural insistence on fresh, hot food. While that remains true, the Indian kitchen has been going electric over the last few years. Moving beyond mixer-grinders and coffee makers, the kitchen gadgets of the future seem set to automate the parts of cooking that are repetitive, time sensitive, or simply too messy for a weekday evening. These machines can handle Indian cuisine, ingredients, and cooking styles. Abhishek Baxi tries automated appliances, including a multi-cooker, which.
Smart leaders turn failure into fuel
Over the past few decades, as professionals switching to entrepreneurship became more common, the perception of “failure” too has changed. The default setting was always stigma, ignoring the fact that one could harness the resulting learnings for good. This new view of failure has entered the corporate world where the best modern leaders learn to embed the values and attitudes to failure that they want to encourage. They lead the charge on failure by being open about their own failures and also taking a visible role in confronting failures in the business. In an excerpt from Fail Smarter, Dougal Shaw explains why.
Arunachal’s small tea farmers
My introduction to Donyi Polo tea estate in Arunachal Pradesh was through their famed Golden Needle teas that earned a record price in the auctions back in 2019. Over these years, I have enjoyed several conversations with Omak Apang, its owner, who always speaks proudly of the artisanal centre at the estate, which is run by a team of 10 women. Many of the teas I have enjoyed in these years were made in this centre, headed by Junmoni Baido, who began as a tea plucker nearly 40 years ago.
I travelled to the Donyi Polo estate last month. It is the largest in Arunachal Pradesh, started in 1985 by Yadap Apang, Omak’s late mother. While it was the first estate to come up here, tea itself was not new to this East Siang valley. What the estate did was create a model, offer employment, and become the knowledge hub for the villages around here.
When Donyi Polo was started, experts were sought from the planters’ body, UPASI in south India. Later, Japanese experts arrived. Takur Darrang, the manager of the estate, says when he started in 1991, tea had been planted on 20 hectares. There was a small factory that made only orthodox tea, which was sold in Kolkata. The estate has since expanded to 420 hectares, with another estate, Mouling, created further away, at a higher altitude.
But the creation of the tea estate was only the beginning. In 2008-09, the estate started the Siang outreach programme to share their tea knowledge with others. Many were small holding farmers so the intent was to support them to cultivate tea so that it yielded not just enough for a family’s own use but to also sell. Donyi Polo became the knowledge partner for farmers, teaching cultivation, pruning, and organic practices to small tea growers in this East Siang region. Darrang reckons nearly 5,000 people have been trained.
On the day before my return, there was a small gathering of tea farmers. Everyone came with tea for tasting. The table was set up under a tree in front of the artisanal centre. Junmoni Baido says she’s been making artisanal tea for 10-15 years. Darrang says 20 is more like it. It doesn’t matter, not knowing when something started, as much as what it has enabled.
I turn to Osi Taying and Oni Dupak from Mirem village, about 20km from Oyan. They show me their hands, stained brown. “It’s tea,” they smile, “because we handroll tea.” Their hands are stain-free in winter, when tea making is paused. Talk turned to what difference tea has brought to their lives. For some, the income has helped build a home, room by room. Others speak of adding a micro-factory, maybe a homestay. Or quite simply, as Osi says, being a tea farmer has allowed her to take care of her kitchen and still have some for her own expenses.
1001 Teas is a fortnightly series about the many stories hidden in the world of tea. Aravinda Anantharaman (@AravindaAnanth1) is a tea drinker, writer and editor.
Is content creation changing the menu? Influencer culture is transforming eating out, and restaurants are adapting dishes, decor and operations to be more reel-friendly
“The first thing he said was that the restaurant should be ‘Instagrammable’,” says Prateek Sadhu, chef-owner of Naar in Kasauli. He was referring to a recent conversation with someone launching a restaurant in Delhi. “They even wanted dishes designed with the camera in mind, right down to how a sauce would be poured. I don’t think that’s the right direction.”
Before the internet, restaurant recommendations came from newspapers, magazines, travel guides, food critics and journalists. Today, recommendations are more likely to come from social media creators, shifting the focus to instant discoverability. Visibility matters, and content creators have become one of the fastest ways to generate attention in a market filled with new restaurants and launches. Your social media feed is now your recommendation engine and creators by virtue of creating this content are arbiters of your choice. And so, restaurants are adapting to this reality by planning design, menus and strategies to accommodate it.
“Television, billboards, newspapers and magazines... most traditional marketing channels are expensive for restaurateurs. How else do we make people aware of our restaurants? Social media content is as economical as it is effective,” says Manish Mehrotra, chef-owner of Nisaba in Delhi.
In 2026, opening a restaurant without a social media strategy is business harakiri. Social content influences restaurant design itself. At Japonico, a Japanese restaurant that opened in Gurugram in 2025, a striking water body behind the bar was created with social media in mind, says founder Sahil Sambhi. It’s likely you’ll see similar features in any restaurant you visit—a particularly well-lit corner, a colourful wall, striking flower arrangements, and even stylish washrooms designed for the ’Gram.
Shinir Sethi, founder of Louve, a European restaurant in Delhi, says their central crystal installation was designed as a visual focal point that guests would want to photograph and share. “It features prominently in guest-generated content,” she adds.
But chefs and restaurateurs insist the fundamentals must come first. Mehrotra’s Nisaba, his first outside of Indian Accent, generated significant buzz on social media even before its launch. But as he points out, visibility can only take a restaurant so far. “A reel may bring the guest in, but once the guest is here, the experience is all that matters.”
Chef Lakhan Jethani of Mizu Izakaya, Mumbai, echoes the sentiment. “Today, content is a conversation that should be had at the creative design stage for any restaurant, but food, service, and hygiene come even before.”
Not all restaurants have had to evolve at the same pace. Legacy institutions like Bukhara and Dum Pukht built their reputation long before social media existed. For them, the relationship often works in reverse: iconic dishes attract creators, and not the other way around. Anil Chadha, managing director, ITC Hotels Ltd, explains: “Social media was not present when the naan bukhara was originally served to the diners. Today, when content creators are drawn to its visual appeal, it exemplifies how authentic experiences serve as the true catalyst for engagement.”
Chef Doma Wang of Kolkata’s The Blue Poppy Thakali takes a more old-school view. Having built her restaurant’s reputation largely through word-of-mouth over the past two decades, she says, “I don’t have the resources to host creators, but even if I did, I don’t think I would.”
For newer restaurants, this is no longer a choice, and creator collaborations are becoming more curated. Visibility is no longer about inviting creators with the largest follower counts. “We focus on identifying creators whose audience aligns with the restaurant’s cuisine, positioning, and target customer,” says Pankhuri Harikrishan, founder & CEO of Fetch.
“The fit has to be right. Changing algorithms, shrinking attention spans, and an exploding creator economy mean every reel has to work harder than the last. “Negative reviews can get you followers faster, but I choose not to go in that direction,” says Sameer Bawa, who has over 300,000 followers on Instagram.
That approach can cost opportunities. “Everybody is a food creator now,” says Anjana Gopakumar, the Kochi-based creator of @AnjanaGopakumar_. Restaurants frequently invite her to experience and promote their offerings. “When I refuse to recommend a restaurant unless I genuinely like it, brands simply find someone else.”
But authenticity has its rewards. “You build a circle of trust, and followers know they can rely on your recommendations,” adds Bawa. Gopakumar recalls the owner of Grana Pizzeria in Kochi telling her how tourists in the city still discover his restaurant through a video she posted over a year ago. “It’s gratifying to know that good storytelling can have a long shelf life,” she says.
Diners sit at the centre of this ecosystem, as both audience and participant. For Kavleen Singh and Aneesh Mediratta, a Gurugram-based couple working in consulting, social media is often where restaurant discovery begins. “If it’s a recommendation from someone we follow, we’ll usually order at least one of the dishes they have suggested,” says Singh.
Restaurateurs point to the clear link between content and business. Sahil Sambhi, who opened Nadoo in Delhi, recalls how attention on social media turned the restaurant’s egg puff into a must-order dish within the first few weeks of its launch. “After that, almost every table wanted to order it,” he says.
“Content allows diners to discover the story behind a dish even before they visit,” says Vignesh Ramachandran, chef-partner at Hyderabad’s Theta Theta Telugu. “A viral post in 2025 during our soft launch, on Chintapandu Ghee Prawns, a Telugu take on the classic Spanish gambas al ajilio, immediately saw a surge in orders. The dish remains a best-seller today.”
Does the impact go beyond immediate footfalls? “Reservations do go up, but what’s equally valuable is when people save, share, or talk about the brand within their circles. That is far more sustainable than one-time visibility,” says Karann R. Chawla, founder of She’s Here, a Gurugram-based Omakase restaurant.
There’s a clear shift in how we experience food. We still eat with our eyes first. The difference is that the first encounter with a restaurant, a dish or even a craving now happens on a screen, long before we arrive at the table.
Tanu Ganguly is a Gurugram-based journalist who writes about food, dining, and culture.
Anthropic urges global pause in AI development, flags ‘self-improvement’ risk The $1 trillion startup warns AI models are nearing capability to improve without human intervention
Anthropic is calling for top artificial intelligence labs to weigh slowing the pace of development, suggesting that AI systems are advancing so rapidly that they may soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention in ways that could pose significant societal risks. The ability to slow global AI development would “likely be a good thing,” the company said Thursday in a blog post that disclosed internal data documenting how quickly its most advanced models are improving.
The post, written by the head of its internal research institute and a company co-founder, noted that model advances appear to be on a path toward “recursive self-improvement,” when AI systems can improve on their own without human intervention. Some AI insiders have seen that threshold as a potential marker of danger and enormous societal upheaval. “We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” the post, written by Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, says. It proposes a global agreement on how to potentially slow development and a mechanism for verifying that competitors are respecting it.
The post cautions that recursive self-improvement hasn’t yet happened and isn’t inevitable, “but could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for”. Anthropic recently concluded a fundraising round that valued the company at almost $1 trillion and filed confidential paperwork to begin the process of publicly listing its shares. The company has recently emerged as the front-runner in a ferocious competition for AI supremacy with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which is also expected to file paperwork for an initial public offering soon. Anthropic’s run rate is on track to reach $50 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this month, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
The AI industry has been divided for some time on how close current models are to reaching benchmarks like “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, a level of intelligence that is comparable to humans, or recursive self-improvement. Some scholars, such as Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms, have argued that frontier systems based on large-language models won’t ever be capable of making the leap to rivaling human intelligence. While seeing AI models as powerful tools, he has compared them to the intelligence of a cat and sparred with researchers who fear that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.
Anthropic’s leaders, including Chief Executive Dario Amodei, have warned about the potential for dangerous impacts from AI for years. Amodei has warned that AI could worsen inequality and eliminate as many as half of entry-level white-collar jobs. He has also warned that it is plausible that powerful AI systems could develop destructive tendencies in unpredictable ways. In an essay in January, Amodei suggested that training AI systems with science-fiction narratives of AI rebellion could, for instance, end up causing real AIs to rebel.
Clark, the blog post’s co-author and an Anthropic co-founder, believes recursive self-improvement could happen within the next two years, and possibly sooner. “In the absence of a coordinated, global slowdown, we are left with the current situation: powerful technology being developed at breakneck speed by a variety of actors in a variety of countries, locked in a competition with one another where commercial and geopolitical rivalries are drowning out the larger existential-to-the-species aspects of the technology being built,” he said.
Thursday’s blog post says the Anthropic Institute will conduct research to “help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require”. The company likened the problem to nuclear-weapons treaties but acknowledged stopping cheating would be even thornier. “Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos,” the blog post read, adding, “whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead”.
The company has long faced criticism that its policy work is designed to slow the advances of competitors. David Sacks, a venture capital investor and informal adviser to President Trump, has accused Anthropic’s leaders of running a “regulatory capture agenda” that could lead to an effort to ban cheaper open-source models. Others have suggested the warnings are a marketing ploy, pointing to Anthropic’s decision to limit the release of a powerful “Mythos” cybersecurity model as a way to tout its products' capabilities.
Anthropic’s leaders maintain they take safety seriously. Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton, said that while critics see marketing, many within the company are “true believers”. “AI labs are a mix of things,” said Mollick. “There is a trillion-dollar company with all the normal trillion-dollar company stuff like marketing teams and lawyers. Then there is a core of researchers who are just building the next models. And then there is a set of people who are philosopher kings who are concerned about the future and what comes next, and they’re all in conflict with each other at times”.
India posts 7.7% FY26 growth amid strong March qtr
Despite the quarterly moderation, the annual figure came in slightly above projections for a 7.6% growth
India’s economy expanded 7.7% in fiscal year 2026 (FY26), up from 7.1% in the previous year, according to provisional estimates released by the statistics ministry under the new GDP series (base year 2022-23).
The gross value added (GVA), which strips out volatile indirect taxes and government subsidy payouts, grew 7.9% in the March quarter (Q4), compared to a revised 8% in the previous quarter. With this performance, India maintained its position as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, following recorded growth rates of 7.1% in 2024-25, 9.2% in 2023-24, 7.2% in 2022-23, and 8.7% in 2021-22.
Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran, speaking at a press conference in New Delhi, noted that while high-frequency data shows “extraordinary resilience,” there are emerging signs of stress due to external factors. He highlighted that the evolving West Asia crisis represents a significant supply shock and could potentially trigger a demand shock. Other primary concerns include:
- Oil Prices: Uncertainty regarding how prices will evolve.
- Monsoon Risks: Potential impact on inflation, disposable income, and private final consumption expenditure.
While the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has lowered the FY27 growth forecast to 6.6% from 6.9%—citing risks from a sub-normal monsoon and geopolitical conflict—Nageswaran expressed confidence that macroeconomic stability measures and supply-side assurances would help the economy return to a 7%-plus growth path by FY28 or sooner if external conditions improve. For now, the government is proceeding with the RBI's projections of 6.6% growth with downside risks and 5.1% inflation with an upside risk.
China boosts India oil meal imports India’s oil meal exports to China has surged from $15.7 million in 2015, marking a nearly 900% rise over the decade
India has emerged as a key supplier of oil meal for China’s livestock and poultry feed, with exports having surged more than 25-fold to $157 million in 2025, as Beijing diversifies feed imports away from its traditional suppliers. India had shipped out oil meal worth $6.1 million in 2024.
According to the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) data, reviewed by Mint, India’s oil meal exports to China has surged from $15.7 million in 2015, marking a nearly 900% rise over the decade, and raising China’s share in India’s global oil meal shipments to 13.5% in 2025 from 0.4% in 2024.
The shift comes as China, the world’s largest consumer of animal feed ingredients, looks to reduce dependence on its traditional suppliers such as the US, Brazil and Argentina amid periodic supply disruptions, weather-related production risks and volatility in global agricultural commodity prices. China was a marginal market for Indian oil meal exports for most of the past decade, accounting for under 2% of shipments in most years. Oil meal is the protein-rich by-product left after extracting oil from oilseeds such as soybean, mustard and groundnut and is also used as an organic fertilizer.
Pricing is a key factor here. “The sharp rise in India’s oil meal exports to China was largely driven by India’s competitive pricing of rapeseed meal and China’s restrictions on Canadian canola imports,” said B.V. Mehta, executive director of The Solvent Extractors’ Association of India, an industry body representing the vegetable oil and oilseed sector. “This created a significant opportunity for Indian exporters to fill the supply gap in the Chinese feed market”.
Will do whatever it takes for steady rupee: RBI governor Malhotra says RBI doesn’t target a specific exchange rate, allows rupee to be market-driven
Subhana Shaikh subhana.shaikh@livemint.com MUMBAI
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will do “whatever it takes” to maintain orderly conditions in the foreign exchange market and curb excessive volatility, governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Friday while announcing the monetary policy decision.
Addressing concerns about sharp currency swings, Malhotra reiterated that the RBI does not target any specific exchange rate and allows the rupee to be determined by market forces.
“Our experience, however, suggests that it may sometimes witness movements, often caused by speculative pressures, especially in the wake of heightened uncertainty, that are not in sync with fundamentals and are disruptive of economic activity,” Malhotra said.
He stressed that while the RBI would not resist market-driven adjustments in the currency, it would intervene to prevent disorderly conditions and curb excessive volatility.
On Friday, the Indian rupee opened at 95.7250 and closed at 95.18 against the dollar, up 56 paisa from the previous close. On Thursday, it had ended at 95.7925.
RBI's reassurance comes amid a sharp decline in the Indian rupee in recent months. Since the US-Iran war began on 28 February, the Indian rupee has depreciated by over 5% to hit a record low of 96.8262 on 20 May. In 2025-26, the local unit plummeted by over 11%, according to Bloomberg data.
Malhotra said that India’s foreign exchange reserves provide a strong buffer against external shocks and that the central bank has a broad range of regulatory and market-based instruments to respond effectively as may be required.
India's foreign exchange reserves stood at $682.3 billion as of 29 May, providing import cover of about 11 months, according to the governor's statement. Before the outbreak of the US-Iran war, reserves were at $723 billion as of 20 February, RBI data showed.
“All the measures announced by the RBI governor were focused around increasing access to foreign exchange through increased foreign capital, fuelling long term growth support while also boosting foreign exchange reserves to deal with the increased currency volatility,” said Vivek Iyer, partner and financial services risk leader at Grant Thornton Bharat.
On 25 May, the governor had told Mint in an interview that the Indian rupee may be undervalued.
“With the recent depreciation, it would be reasonable to think that rupee is not overvalued. If anything, one could argue that rupee has become undervalued, both in nominal as well as in REER (real effective exchange rate) terms,” Malhotra had said.
He had said the RBI does not target any specific exchange-rate level and would intervene only to curb abnormal and high volatility or undue speculation.
CURBING VOLATILITY
- THE RBI governor said the central bank would intervene to prevent disorderly conditions
- ON Friday, the rupee closed at 95.18 against the dollar, up 56 paisa from the previous close
- RBI’S reassurance comes amid a sharp decline in the Indian rupee in recent months
- ON 25 May, the governor had told Mint that the Indian rupee may be undervalued
Measures to ease doing business key to boosting NRI, OCI capital RBI hiked investment limits for NRIs and OCIs.
Ram Sahgal ram.sahgal@livemint.com MUMBAI
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and government measures to attract foreign capital from non-resident Indians (NRIs) and overseas citizens of India (OCIs) will succeed if complemented by steps to increase the ease of doing business, said market experts and securities lawyers.
The central bank hiked the investment limits for NRIs and OCIs in equities traded on the stock market, without Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) registration, and extended the facility to persons resident outside India (PROI).
While the individual limit for NRIs/OCIs or person of Indian origin is being doubled to 10% and the aggregate limit is being hiked to 24% from 10% in listed companies, the same is being extended to foreign entities that hold or operate assets in India, categorised as persons resident outside India.
RBI will issue timelines for the measures’ implementation. The call for relaxation of processes stems from NRI holdings in listed stocks remaining well below the extant limits. For instance, NRI ownership as a share of Sensex market capitalisation stood at just 0.7% as of Q4 FY26, per BSE data.
“It is a step in the right direction, but needs to be complemented by simple and digital processes related to KYC, taxation, repatriation, etc., for significant inflows to materialise,” said Nilesh Shah, managing director at Kotak Mahindra Asset Management, adding that documentation processes and taxation had to be simplified to attract foreign capital.
While agreeing with Shah, senior securities lawyer Chirag Shah felt the need of the hour was to immediately address the heavy foreign portfolio outflows, as even these could, for now, stem the rupee’s slide.
“This is a good step structurally, which will result in potentially higher inflows from these cohorts notwithstanding the extant challenges involved for them to invest here,” Shah said. “The other issues can be resolved over time”.
Some of the notable Sensex companies in which NRIs hold stakes include Asian Paints (1.17%), Jio Financial (1.18%), JSW Steel Ltd (1.15%), L&T (1.27%) and Trent (5.36%) as of the March quarter, per BSE.
FPIs have pulled out $57.68 billion worth of shares from India’s secondary market since 2025, thanks to global artificial intelligence (AI) trade, slowing corporate earnings and, more recently, the West Asia war, which has disrupted nearly a fifth of the world’s crude supplies, per S.K. Joshi, consultant at Khambatta Securities.
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