Why I Named This the Spectacularly Unprofitable Tiffin Center

Most names in tech or policy writing try to sound Important™ — like they’re here to solve capitalism, scale disruption, or at the very least, land a book deal.
This one doesn’t.

I named this newsletter Spectacularly Unprofitable Tiffin Center — not as a metaphor, but as a pretty direct homage.

My parents still run the real thing — Kalpana Mess and Tiffin Center, tucked into a corner of Kota, Rajasthan.
Yes you can find it on Google Maps. No it’s not going viral on Instagram.
But for over 15 years, it’s been quietly feeding students, workers, and the occasional stranger with nowhere else to go.
And it never made money. Not really.

But it paid for everything that actually counted.

My cricket kits. My first phone. The tickets to go visit my girlfriend who lived in Delhi.
It bought me a bulky Lenovo all-in-one desktop — CPU, monitor, and speakers fused like some socialist Transformer.
That’s where I wrote my first code, stayed up late chasing syntax and cinema, trying to debug both.
It paid for my school fees — the kind of school where people said things like “public infrastructure” and “developmental economics” like they were theoretical.
For me, they weren’t.

They were the tiffin center.
Infrastructure was the aluminum kadhais. Policy was the mood after finally paying the 2-months delayed rent.
Economics was the sound of 10-rupee-coins being counted too carefully at 10:30 p.m.

This newsletter is an attempt to bring those worlds back into the same frame.
To say that cinema, policy, economics, and tech aren’t abstractions — they’re lived.
They stain your shirt. They simmer over slow heat. They’re served in steel.

Some posts will be structured. Others will collapse like an overstuffed paratha.
Some will be tender. Some will be sharp.
All of them will carry the smell of something cooking — even if it’s burning.

Because sometimes the things that don’t scale are the ones that feed you.
Some things just show up, day after day, like a good tiffin.
Quiet. Warm. Always enough to share.

Welcome to the mess.