·FF Life
Raghu Rai, Who Taught Us How to See India
A tribute to the veteran photojournalist whose work revealed the country’s beauty, contradictions, and defining moments
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
NR
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
NS Ramnath is a member of the founding team & Lead - Newsroom Innovation at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book, The Aadhaar Effect. His main interests lie in technology, business, society, and how they interact and influence each other. He writes a regular column on disruptive technologies, and takes regular stock of key news and perspectives from across the world.
Ram, as everybody calls him, experiments with newer story-telling formats, tailored for the smartphone and social media as well, the outcomes of which he shares with everybody on the team. It then becomes part of a knowledge repository at Founding Fuel and is continuously used to implement and experiment with content formats across all platforms.
He is also involved with data analysis and visualisation at a startup, How India Lives.
Prior to Founding Fuel, Ramnath was with Forbes India and Economic Times as a business journalist. He has also written for The Hindu, Quartz and Scroll. He has degrees in economics and financial management from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.
He tweets at @rmnth and spends his spare time reading on philosophy.
My Work at Founding Fuel
·FF Life
On the Edge: Urgent Stories Our Wild Places Tell—A Tribute to Ramki
In memory of a friend, mentor, and conservationist, we present the 2025 Ramki Sreenivasan Conservation Photography Award—images that reveal the startling, intimate, and often uncomfortable ways in which human lives now intersect with the wild
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Leadership & Organisation
Zoho’s New CEO, Same Grounded Playbook
As Sridhar Vembu steps back to focus on AI, Shailesh Davey takes the lead, steering Zoho into the future, on its own terms
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Artificial Intelligence
Our extended minds and AI notetakers
Transcription tools enhance our intelligence, allow us to revisit conversations and glean insights we might have missed, and share knowledge with extended teams. Here's what you need to know to select the right one for you
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
Who owns your data—you, the creator, or the platform?
The Kunal Kamra-BookMyShow face-off is more than a dust-up between a performer and a ticketing platform. It is a snapshot of a larger issue that will only become more pressing. And it impacts all of us
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
The Billion-User Bet
Nandan Nilekani’s key to unlock the Indian market opportunity and galvanise growth: reforms in the four key areas of technology, capital, entrepreneurship and formalization
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
Briefing #3 | The US-China tech rivalry: More than tech
Six industries to watch as the complicated relationship between the two countries in geopolitics extends to technology too
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
The existential dilemmas facing cultural festivals
Can a festival survive and thrive without corporate sponsorship? Yes — and here’s how Bangalore literature festival found freedom through community funding
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: A beginner's guide to graphic novels
Discovering the power of visual language
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: The art of slowing down
An effective antidote to the cult of speed
NR
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Systems thinking — Seeing the whole
Five books to nurture your systems thinking skills
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Business & Strategy
Fintech Special Report Part 1: Indian fintech at a crossroad
The outlook for fintech companies has shifted from unchecked optimism to uncertainty. The rose-tinted glasses are off and some of the well-funded companies are pivoting. Their future will depend on their ability to look beyond technology as the panacea. Part 1 of a 4-part series
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Business & Strategy
Fintech Special Report Part 2: From competition to collaboration
The ground reality has changed. Fintechs are realising that partnerships and ecosystem thinking are key to winning the market, not competing with the incumbents. Part 2 of a 4-part series
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
Fintech Special Report Part 3: The limits of algos
Fintechs bet on data and algos to know the credit-worthiness of the underserved. However, there's a gap in what the data can reveal because of consumer behaviour. Part 3 of a 4-part series
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
Fintech Special Report Part 4: A fine balance
Fintech must contend with inherent conflicts with what the regulators want. Fintech’s push for rapid scaling needs to balance with the regulators’ push for financial stability and consumer protection. Part 4 in this 4-part series
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Engaging with philosophy
Philosophy as an intimate, lived practice rather than a remote academic field
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Focus
July 15, 2023: How to filter out distractions
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: The Cholas — Beyond Ponniyin Selvan 2
Beyond the movie, there are a number of reasons why the Cholas matter. Here’s how one can follow the Chola trail and get a deeper experience of what you saw in the movie
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Collect & Connect — managing information overload
How Obsidian is helping me save ideas and tonnes of information, and also retrieve it and see connections and patterns
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Notes from a rookie doodler—five lessons
Doodling sharpens your visual thinking and communication skills. But the process is teaching me more than sketching
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Five ways to indulge in the spirit of chess
August 6, 2022: There is more to chess than following the game
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Entrepreneurship, Startups & Innovation
The Contrarian
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: Understanding Sri Lanka
May 21, 2022: Four books and two films that help us decode what is causing a crisis this harsh in the island nation
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·FF Life
FF Life: How to make beautiful presentations
Five apps and ideas to create decks that are both beautiful and functional
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
Facebook’s new avatar in 10 images
Renaming Facebook as Meta indicates a big bet on the metaverse, as well as an “escape hatch” from the issues and scrutiny Facebook has been facing. The entire industry is at the beginning of a big wave and Mark Zuckerberg has been building capacity for some years now. However, the key to Meta’s success will depend on whether and how fast customers adopt it to work, learn, play, build and live.
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
The Art of Inversion
The Account Aggregator framework is aimed at giving control of data back to users; but the road will be rough and full of resistance
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
How to take videos that don’t shake
October 16, 2021 | FF Daily #500: FF Recommends handheld gimbals
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Business & Strategy
Behind Infosys’ struggles to deliver the income tax project
Why did the IT major mess up the high-profile government project? No one quite knows the answer. The clues, however, lie in the inherent difficulties in executing tech projects for the government
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
How to make governments smart
A podcast with Jaideep Prabhu, professor at Cambridge Judge Business School and author of ‘How Should A Government Be? The New Levers of State Power’
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Economy, Policy & Society
Tim Harford on sensemaking and storytelling
How to make meaning from data and the deluge of information
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
How tech firms are eating media
This Week in Disruptive Tech | January 27, 2021: The media business; Sangeet Paul Choudary on empowering workers; Will Clubhouse click in India
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Leadership & Organisation
FF Daily #273: The value of doubt
January 14, 2021: Richard Feynman on leaving room for doubt; How Mumbai Traffic Police became a brand; How to thrive in a vuca world; Privacy vs People
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
The age of disruptive imitation
This Week in Disruptive Tech | December 3, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Artificial Intelligence
AlphaFold; Bitcoins; and the Chinese lunar mission
This Week in Disruptive Tech | December 3, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
The Oxford vaccine & potato chips; edtech & WhiteHat Jr; Windows 1
This Week in Disruptive Tech | November 25, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
How to protect data
This Week in Disruptive Tech | November 19, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
How UPI scaled up; What's behind Apple's Mac chips: Climate change and music
This Week in Disruptive Tech | November 4, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Business & Strategy
Why ecommerce firms are hungry for brick-and-mortar
This Week in Disruptive Tech | October 28, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
Ecommerce in festive season; China’s tech war; Investing in disruptive tech
This Week in Disruptive Tech | October 21, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Technology & the Future
IBM spins off tech services; UK probes Cambridge Analytica; Big Tech & AI
This Week in Disruptive Tech | October 14, 2020: A roundup of news and perspectives on how technology is shaping the future, here in India and across the world
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N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel