From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
India is conservative on the outside, but becoming more liberal inside. A lot of my stories are about the double life that younger India has to lead…. The conflict between conservatism and liberal values.
Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.
History is the story of those who wrote it… I have been trying very hard to add people back into the history of art who should have been there all along. I see this like Pompeii, these artists exist, but they're covered in ash. We must excavate them.
The most important part of being at a festival, is being completely present in those moments. If you put your phone in your pocket, you'll probably have a better time.
Women were never in the driver's seat with dating. It always came down to the man to take the lead, to ask the girl... There was this playbook where the guy has the power, the girl is weak and fragile waiting to be saved by Prince Charming... and this is disempowering for both sides.
I started writing fiction because I was lonely. I was an only child, a solitary child, raised by a single working mother, which was very unusual at the time in Turkey. Literature gave me a sense of continuity, coherence; it kept my pieces together. It helped me to connect even when I felt like I didn't quite belong.
We've had an explosion of platforms that have atomized the delivery and consumption of music, and I'm really for that- it's democratized music. Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… that's all gone now.
More than just being a luxury item, they are pieces that represent milestone moments- that's why they're important. People also reflect on whether diamonds are a hard asset class. They are the hardest of all assets, being the hardest asset known to man!
All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique. For all of those reasons, when you ask a consumer, particularly a woman, if they would be happy to have a synthetic diamond engagement ring? the answer is no…
We keep getting told we need to be living our best life- but we forget we already are. We have a weird epidemic of hating on ourselves, if we stopped doing that, life would get way easier.
By the middle of century, the temperature and humidity in parts of the world will be so high at parts of the year that the human system will not be able to cool itself, you are effectively being cooked. One of the places this will happen first, with potentially grave consequences, is the Arabian Peninsula- disrupting Hajj.
Every business, in a way, is about harmony. If you don't have that sense of harmony and alignment in the pursuit of excellence and the vision, it's going to be tricky.