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Athera's Odyssey

November 2025 | Athera's Odyssey | The Next Wave of Social

From public performance to private reciprocity

November 2025 | Athera's Odyssey | The Next Wave of Social

Odyssey readers,

If the defining social behaviour of the last decade was the “public broadcast” – a pursuit of reach, likes, and virality – a new question is emerging: are we now entering an era of “private belonging”, where users are increasingly retreating into smaller, more trusted spaces?

A May 2025 study published in SAGE Journals introduces the idea of “bounded social media places” — lower-visibility spaces such as group chats that offer users greater control over who sees their content. The study argues that social use is shifting away from algorithmic feeds toward semi-private, tightly networked environments that feel more authentic.

To understand this gap and the broader shift from public broadcasting to private, reciprocal sharing, we interviewed:

  • Manohar Singh Charan, Co-Founder & CFO of ShareChat and Moj, to explore how a large vernacular social platform is navigating the move from scale to substance
  • Mayank Bidawatka, Founder of PicSee, to explore the mechanics of “mutual photo-sharing” and the philosophy of building a “personal memories network.”
  • Ankit Prasad, Founder of Bobble AI, to unpack how Indians are expressing identity and emotion through keyboards, stickers, and AI.

You can read the entire issue below or, if you want to go to a specific piece, click on the respective links above.

The Next Billion Users

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How ShareChat is Rewiring Social for the Next Billion Internet Users

India’s next digital chapter is unfolding across countless living rooms as the country is estimated to reach one billion users by the end of this year.

Across ShareChat and Moj’s ecosystem of 200 million+ monetisable users, an important realignment is underway. While public feeds still attract eyeballs, the real engagement, which builds habits and forges connections, is migrating to smaller, more intentional communities.

Manohar Singh Charan has watched this behavioural shift from a unique vantage point. As ShareChat’s Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer, he helped steer the company to cash-flow positivity while observing user behaviour transform in fundamental ways.

“Users increasingly engage with content that feels relatable and personally meaningful, valuing contextual and cultural relevance,” Charan says.

“Across both ShareChat and Moj, and now with Quick TV too, this trend has been particularly evident over the past few years in the rapid growth of micro-communities, hyperlocal cohorts and the relatability of such narratives.”

While the larger, language-based public feeds continue to attract substantial traffic, the engagement rate within niche and personalised content sharing communities is growing at a much faster pace, Charan says. “The time spent, frequency of repeat sessions, and week-on-week retention are all increasing more sharply within these communities.”

Interestingly, Charan views this as a recalibration rather than a pullback.

“This shift doesn’t replace the need for large, open platforms; instead, it redefines where real engagement happens. Users continue to browse the public feed, but the meaningful conversations and interactions increasingly happen within smaller, more intimate circles.” For a platform conceived around India’s linguistic diversity, this appears to be a noteworthy progression.

Megaphone → Microphone

The mechanics behind this transition reveal a fascinating evolution in what Indian users expect from their digital experiences.

Charan describes “the move from broad, one-size-fits-all content consumption to deeply personalised, language-first experiences” as the most significant shift of the past decade. Users once navigated through platform-wide trends, but they now expect their digital spaces to understand their cultural context instinctively.

ShareChat’s technical response has been to build what Charan calls “one of the most efficient recommendation engines built in India for India, at a fraction of the cost of global counterparts.”

This system analyses both positive and negative signals in real-time, constantly refining its understanding of what makes content feel personally relevant rather than merely popular.

“Real-time feature fetching, continuous A/B testing and granular modelling of user intent ensure each feed feels uniquely relevant,” he explains, helping users “consume and share content that truly resonates in their preferred language.”

The financial story mirrors this behavioural shift.

After achieving scale, the company’s focus has turned from acquisition to nourishment. Charan’s concept of “new-age capex” — which he once defined as user acquisition — has evolved accordingly.

“With ShareChat’s core business now cash-flow positive, the focus has shifted back to investment in sustainable, quality-driven growth,” he notes. For a platform serving more than 200 million+ users, “the investment focus is less about chasing incremental users and more about reinforcing the foundations that keep the ecosystem healthy.”

This has meant making deliberate choices that prioritise efficiency without compromising experience.

“Improving our recommendation systems wasn’t just a technical upgrade,” Charan reflects. “It fundamentally reduced operating costs while making the user experience faster, more relevant, and more satisfying.”

Technical optimisations — which Charan describes as “large-scale content deduplication, smarter retrieval, and rigorous tracking of costs associated with all experiments” — collectively trimmed infrastructure expenses while maintaining quality. The approach signals a maturation in how Indian tech companies view and assess growth: less as endless expansion, and more as deepening roots and meaningful connections.

Languages of Belonging

The numbers reveal where these roots are spreading fastest.

Charan points to an important statistic: even in metropolitan regions, 57% of ShareChat users prefer regional languages, signalling that the next wave of growth will emerge from “rural India and Tier-2/3 towns, which are still in the early stages of forming digital habits,” he says.

“What has evolved is the ease and confidence with which users engage in their own languages,” Charan observes. “Users want to communicate in the language that reflects their lived reality.”

This linguistic confidence is challenging long-held industry assumptions about the “Bharat” user.

“One longstanding misconception has been that users in Bharat are primarily passive consumers,” he contends.

The reality his team has witnessed is dramatically different: “A vibrant creator economy has emerged from non-metro audiences — millions of users who don’t just watch content but actively shape it through creation, remixing, and participation. They set cultural cues as much as they follow them, often driving the formats and trends that later reach mainstream audiences,” adds Charan.

Another assumption the team has had to rethink relates to content depth — the notion that users beyond major cities prefer only light, surface-level entertainment, he says.

“The rise of microdramas, serialised storytelling, and aspirational narratives especially among Tier 2 and Tier 3 creators shows a clear appetite for depth, craft, and emotional resonance,” Charan says. “These creators are pushing the boundaries of what local content can be.”

The Next Wave

This creative fuel is now driving the platform’s next act.

“While short-form video has become a dominant and deeply engaging format, our ShareChat and Moj user insights reveal a growing appetite for richer, narrative-led content that could still be consumed in short bursts. Users across demographics are seeking stories with continuity, characters, and emotional arcs, but in a format that fits their fragmented daily viewing patterns.”

The microdrama segment, which only launched in India in the last quarter of FY25, is already witnessing what he describes as “explosive traction,” projected to grow from $9 million in FY25 to $1.1 billion by FY30, according to a RedSeer report. QuickTV’s trajectory illustrates this as well, crossing 25 million-plus downloads within five months, making it one of India’s fastest-scaling microdrama platforms, Charan notes.

Artificial intelligence serves as both catalyst and companion in this broad evolution, says Charan. “AI is becoming central to how platforms shape meaningful user experiences,” he states, particularly through systems that process “vast volumes of signals in real time to refine recommendations.”

The efficiency gains are substantial — QuickTV already uses “GenAI workflows that cut production cycles from weeks to days and reduce costs by nearly 75%.” The technology currently serves the human need for connection, rather than replacing it.

According to Charan, building for India’s next social wave ultimately means embracing all of this complexity. “Building for India means building for diversity — languages, aspirations, geographies, devices, and cultural contexts.” The platforms that are most likely to succeed, he believes, will be those that can “translate this complexity into simple, meaningful interactions that make users feel understood.”

After years of chasing scale, the most valuable metric might just be shifting towards intimacy — creating environments where users find “belonging, inspiration, and community in ways that reflect who they are and how they want to be heard,” he reflects.

In India’s next social chapter, the greatest reach may come not from shouting louder or the largest megaphone, but from those who build based on listening more closely to the whispers from the next billion users.

Public Performance → Private Reciprocity

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Think about your photo gallery. It’s likely a one-sided story, filled with the selfies you took, and the scenes you curated.

Now, think about the other side of the story — the photos of you that live on your friends’ and family’s phones, unseen and unshared. The group shots from a wedding, the candid moments from a dinner, the proof of that one time you swore you met a celebrity at the airport. This vast, distributed archive of your own life is what the current social web has so far failed to solve for.

PicSee, Mayank Bidawatka’s newest venture after the micro-blogging platform Koo, is built on an insight that was born in collective decades of personal frustration.

“This is a product that’s been on my mind for over 10 years now,” he says. “A lot of my friends would not share photos with me. While I am a victim, I am also the guy who commits the crime of not sharing.”

The ‘Of Course’ Moment // Building for the Emotion of Mine

The pattern was familiar: a group outing, a burst of WhatsApp messages the next day, back-and-forths of who has this pic? and please send mine, and the inevitable long pause because the person with the photos was in a meeting or forgot.

“This was a regular thing,” Bidawatka says. “That’s how I realised this was a pain point.”

With billions of smartphones worldwide, anyone can be a photographer, but the vast majority of these photos never make it back to the people in them. At first glance, the reasons seem obvious — laziness, forgetfulness, distraction, but Bidawatka asserts that the real explanation runs deeper.

“The insight lies in the fact that that person has nothing to gain by giving it to someone else,” he says. Social media behaviour, he argues, makes more sense when viewed through incentives. “If people don’t benefit from doing a particular action, they stop doing that action.”

Sharing photos privately, he realised, has little upside for the sender. The person who gives the photos away gets nothing back — the person who receives them gets everything. And so the system breaks.

PicSee’s most important design decision came from flipping this incentive structure. “Hey, you have 50 of my photos, and I have 50 of your photos,” he explains. “If you give me mine, I will give you yours.”

PicSee’s core mechanic, this “give-to-get” flow, was the answer to this problem, aiming to transform photo-sharing from an elusive, rarely-actualised favour into a mutually beneficial exchange. Facial recognition groups images automatically; tapping one button swaps them instantly. No need to scroll through thousands of pictures; no need for manual effort; and no contingency on the sender’s emotions or moods.

Two Envelopes Test

For its founder, the shift PicSee represents isn’t a new, ephemeral trend, but a return to fundamental human behaviour.

“This was always a need. It just got catered to.” The move towards private, closer-knit circles is a natural correction. “Many of your friends on Facebook may have had open profiles, but now, you see a lot of locked profiles. This is a move of: I want to move towards my smaller circle.”

PicSee doesn’t see itself as a social network in the traditional sense. Away from being about feeds, followers, or public performance, it is built for a much smaller unit: people who were in the same moment together — a shift that Bidawatka believes is foundational.

It also reflects a deeper reversal underway in social technology.

For most of the last decade, success in social products came from ‘more’: more content, more connections, more notifications, more time spent. Bidawatka argues that this logic is now colliding with an interesting insight into user tolerance.

“Nothing has changed,” he says when asked how the market differs from his early days at Koo — the mechanics of growth and distribution are largely the same. “The only thing that has changed is impatience levels, which have increased now. ‘I want everything fast. This page is not loading, move on. This guy is talking too much, move on.’”

What’s interesting is also how that impatience has influenced what people want from social interactions — consumers may not have patience for things that require too much effort, or have patience for public social media performance, but human beings always have patience for themselves.

Here, Bidawatka gives an analogy he returns to multiple times — the ‘two envelopes’ test.

“Imagine that I walked up to you and I handed you two envelopes,” he says. “One envelope has five photos of you, and the other envelope has five photos of your colleagues. I say to you, choose one envelope.”

Everyone, he says, always, invariably, picks their own photos.

“Why? Of course, because it’s your photo! Saying, ‘I want mine first’ — human beings are built like that. It’s survival mode — let me take care of my stuff first.” This, for Bidawatka, is the visceral emotion PicSee is built upon: the “of course” moment of focussing on what is inherently ours.

This philosophy also represents a fundamental flip of traditional social media logic.

On traditional social media platforms, sharing can be a one-way broadcast, dependent on the sender’s mood and manual effort. “You have to select some of the photos from last night — not all of the photos forever. Manually, one has to go into the person’s chat, select the photos, and send it. It is sent in a lower resolution, and the receiver did not even get all of his photos. Also, it all depends on the sender’s mood.”

PicSee automates this, making the exchange mutual, high-resolution, and comprehensive.

Beyond being a mere tool, Bidawatka sees a journey from utility to a new kind of social space and terrain. “All social platforms start off as tools. PicSee in its current form is a tool — one that will now follow the journey of becoming a social platform.”

He envisions PicSee becoming the digital home for your closest relationships. “This is my place for my closest gang. If I have to post something intimate, only this small group will know. This is the place where I want to have these types of conversations.”

That notion stands in contrast to the performative nature of public feeds, where even the most personal posts are exposed to a broad and loosely connected audience.

Even so, building for small, private circles doesn’t mean the company isn’t thinking at scale — it simply means the unit of interaction is small, not necessarily your entire circle of connections.

Building for Population Scale

PicSee’s genesis also undergirds a broader trend around the explosion of anxiety and insecurity that social media has fuelled over the last decade.

According to Bidawatka, major platforms thrive on amplifying those insecurities, because people, when made to feel insecure, end up buying more, clicking more, and consuming more.

“You’re seeing great-looking people and products on social media, and all of that adds insecurity,” he says. “But that’s also a big form of revenue for people who want to make advertising revenue.”

PicSee is intentionally designed to avoid that loop. It doesn’t ask for likes, reactions, comments, or public performance, nor does it require creators or network effects of celebrities to succeed. “PicSee is a smaller unit app. It’s about just you and your closest friends and family members.”

“When I message someone, I might get a response in just a few seconds,” he says. That velocity — people opening their phones several times in a day — creates new expectations for every part of digital communication, including photo exchange.

At the same time, a product that requires access to a user’s entire gallery and facial data operates in a sensitive and increasingly tricky space.

Bidawatka’s approach to gallery access, he says, is rooted in transparency. Whether or not users allow gallery access depends on: “Who’s asking? What are you asking this for? And what will this enable? If I give, what do I get? If I don’t give, what do I lose? If I don’t give them, I won’t get 2000 photos! Okay, I’ll give it.”

Though the app is only two months old, early data so far has surprised him. “Privacy is not as grave [a factor here] as we thought it would be. 95% are doing [facial recognition]. A lot of people may not have given gallery access here, but more than 90% are actually giving it.”

Building for a global audience also means designing for diverse, unexpected user behaviours.

The team was stunned to learn from users in Brazil that a primary reason for backing up photos was a post-COVID surge in phone thefts. “People’s phones were being stolen, so they lost their memories. They wanted to back everything up.”

For female users, a key concern was body image. “A lot of them will take a new selfie to see, ‘have I put on weight?’ So they want to know very clearly, ‘Is my gallery visible to someone?’” he says.

These nuanced insights directly shaped product features, including the 24-hour review period users are given before photos are sent.

Why Now?

Bidawatka’s answer is simultaneously nuanced and straightforward: the problem has existed for years; the technology to solve it is now mature enough.

“Facial recognition wasn’t as strong maybe 10 to 15 years ago,” he says. Also, the sheer volume of photos being taken today — tens of billions a week globally — makes the pain point impossible to ignore.

Users often don’t know they need a solution until they see one. “During the Just Dial days, users didn’t think of Uber,” he says. But once the better experience exists, there’s no going back.

PicSee is positioned at the intersection of that trend: an unassuming infrastructure product that sits beneath the noise of social media and returns something simple to users — their own memories.

His ultimate goal, he says, is in a simple, positive emotion: happiness. “My aim at PicSee is to see people happy. Happiness is delivered in various forms. One form in which I can deliver it is, ‘here are all your past memories. You never got access to these, and I’m unlocking it for you.’”

This philosophy is embedded in the company’s very branding — a penguin named Joy and an elephant named Happy.

Social media began as a tool for communicating outward. The next wave may be a tool for returning inward, which, in the crowded, high-velocity world of social apps, feels like a radical turn. In an era of digital fatigue, PicSee’s bet is that ‘the next wave of social’ may not be about building a bigger stage, but about building a more trusted, reciprocal, and joyful living room for the people who matter most.

The Expressive Keyboard

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Keyboard as a Cultural Operating System

When Ankit Prasad began building his seven-year-old firm Bobble AI, his thesis was deceptively simple. “Our central thesis was that expression is one of the most fundamental needs of every individual,” he says. The goal was to make every digital conversation more personal as well as emotionally resonant.

What he didn’t foresee, he says, was that the keyboard itself would become the central engine for this new, more private era of communication. “Today, Bobble AI is not just about expressive tools — it’s about building a context-aware, multilingual expression and productivity layer that understands emotion, intent, and culture in real time,” he explains.

Bobble AI today powers communication for over 100 million users across 23+ Indian languages, with around 25 million active users at any given time, says Prasad. “Engagement has deepened over time — average daily keyboard usage has grown 2.3x in the last three years, reflecting habit formation.”

Every user who installs Bobble AI must make it their default keyboard, and retention rates remain strong – around 25% after one year, 15% after two, and 10% after three – among the highest in India’s consumer internet space, says Prasad. “Among these, regional language users show the strongest stickiness.”

The evolution — from what was once a basic functional tool to what has now become a complex, multi-faceted foundational layer of social interaction — mirrors the shift itself.

Furthermore, in India’s new private social spaces, a unique linguistic landscape is simultaneously flourishing.

“Digital expression in India has become deeply visual, code-mixed, and emotion-driven,” Prasad observes. “A decade ago, people mostly typed in English or their native language script. Today, users blend languages, emojis, GIFs, and regional slang to express identity and belonging.”

Expression nowadays is both universal and hyperlocal, he says. “People everywhere want to be understood — but how they express that varies by region, language, and even festival. Users want tools that feel like ‘them,’ not generic ones. That’s why personalisation – skin tone stickers, local jokes, contextual predictions – drives adoption.”

Regional expression builds digital confidence, says Prasad. “Users often start typing or sharing in English, but once they find tools that reflect their native language and humour, their engagement deepens dramatically.”

Interestingly, AI-generated short video stories, 3D stickers, and personalised memes spread the fastest online, says Prasad. “For instance, a user’s face rendered as a sticker saying ‘Kya baat hai, bhai!’ in their dialect travels instantly within peer groups. During festivals or cricket season, locally flavoured content explodes, like Bengali Durga Puja wishes or IPL-themed short videos. The key driver isn’t format, but cultural relevance.”

Indian users tend to naturally adapt global digital behaviours and infuse them with local cultural nuance, whether that’s a meme in Haryanvi or a festival greeting in Tamil, adds Prasad.

Voice: India’s Native Interface

Prasad points out that voice is now the “growing frontier of expression” in India. “At Bobble AI, we’ve built speech-to-text and voice typing deeply localised for all major Indian languages, optimised for code-mixing, like Hindi + English,” he says. “It started with around 5% daily adoption in our early years and has grown consistently to now about 25% daily adoption.”

For millions of new internet users, voice is their native interface. Bobble now lets users make voice typing their default input mode, and the company is piloting voice-triggered stickers, emotional tone detection, and real-time emoji suggestions powered by LLMs fine-tuned for Indian expression.

“Our goal isn’t to replace typing with voice — it’s to make communication fluid across modes,” Prasad explains.

“Where many AI upstarts, like Wispr, focus purely on voice-only interfaces, Bobble’s differentiation lies in creating a multimodal keyboard — where text, touch, and voice co-exist seamlessly.”

Reciprocity: The Key to the New Social

Increasingly, the one-way broadcast of a curated Instagram post is being supplanted by the many-to-few loops of validation and reciprocity in private chats.

“Social is shifting from one-to-many to many-to-few, from broadcasting to bonding,” Prasad states. “Conversations are now reciprocal loops of emotion and validation — stickers, reactions, voice notes.”

Communication in India, he says, is often a shared joy. “Stickers and memes travel fast because they elicit instant emotional reciprocity.”

This is the antithesis of the passive, endless scroll – it is active, participatory, and demands a new level of emotional intelligence from the technology itself. The value is perhaps no longer in “being seen” by the most people, but in “being understood” by the right ones.

The Monetisation Puzzle

For all of its cultural resonance, though, building a sustainable, monetisable business on the infrastructure of expression is a formidable challenge — one that Prasad seems to be acutely aware of.

When asked if consumer-facing communication tech can become meaningfully monetisable in India, his answer is measured.

“Yes, but it requires deep integration and scale,” he says. “Monetisation works best when you become part of a user’s daily communication layer — keyboard, input, emoji suggestions — rather than an add-on app.”

Prasad is candid about the do’s and don’ts. “What hasn’t worked is forcing direct monetisation too early.” Instead, he suggests a more patient, layered approach. “What works is building utility first, emotion next, and monetisation last, through advanced consumer subscriptions, brand partnerships, and contextual recommendations.”

Bobble’s slowest growth is in low-connectivity and low-literacy regions, while the fastest growth comes from Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Marathi-speaking belts, with emerging spikes in Bhojpuri and Assamese. Urban bilingual users continue to grow steadily, while regional-first users are adopting Bobble AI keyboards at the fastest pace, he says.

“Initially, our growth was metro-led – early smartphone adopters,” Prasad notes. “But today, over 70% of our audience is from Tier 2, 3, and rural India, reflecting the mass adoption of regional keyboards and input tools. Most users are 18-35 years old, but we’re seeing steady growth among older users discovering voice and native-language typing.”

The AI Enabler

If the “new wave of social” is defined by intimacy and reciprocity, then artificial intelligence could be an essential enabler. For a linguistically and culturally diverse country like India, AI is the bridge that could make hyper-personal communication possible at scale.

“AI powers every interaction within Bobble AI,” Prasad explains, “from predictive text, emotion detection, and contextual content suggestions to personalized recommendations.” In 2024, the company began bundling unlimited AI credits for generative text and images into a monthly subscription, betting that users would pay for a smarter communication co-pilot.

Going forward, Prasad sees AI becoming the “co-pilot of expression.” For India, that could be revolutionary. “Imagine AI that understands code-mixed Hindi-English, recommends contextual stickers for ‘acha chalta hoon,’ or translates emotions seamlessly. The next phase of AI in communication will be assistive and culturally intelligent.”

This hints at a future where technology enhances the emotional depth of conversations. “The future is hyper-personal, assistive, and emotionally intelligent,” Prasad envisions. “Conversations will move from being reactive to predictive – from static to dynamic. AI will help you express tone, intent, and emotion better than words alone.”

More Mature, More Human Digital India?

The collective move from public feeds to private chats signals a maturation of India’s digital audience moving past the novelty of mere connection and towards the depth of meaningful, more personalised communication.

As platforms like Bobble AI show, this movement is also increasingly visible in numbers: 100 million users with around 25 million active users, 2.3x rise in daily engagement over three years, and growing voice adoption across Tier 2 and 3 India.

The businesses that hope to build on this shift may have to tread a delicate three-pronged tightrope – being culturally intelligent enough to earn user trust, useful enough to become a daily habit, and patient enough to monetise without breaking the spell of intimacy.

“Micro-communities are thriving because users crave belonging and trust over reach,” states Prasad. “Encrypted messaging, language comfort, and content fatigue from big social media have all accelerated this shift. Small-group sharing is also more emotionally rewarding.”

The next wave of social in India could be about building a more comfortable, trusted, and intelligent “living room” – a world where technology aims to make every digital conversation feel, as Prasad puts it, ironically, “more human than ever before.” In this new wave, that sense of digital humanity seems to be both the goal and the greatest challenge.

Pathways

In this month’s edition of Pathways, our recommendation arc turns to a question at the heart of modern finance: do markets really behave as rationally as textbooks insist? We dive into the works of Robert Shiller, a pioneer in this field whose works connect dots across domains in the quest to demystify asset prices. A matter of increasingly greater pertinence, given the other-worldly orbitals “AI” stocks have come to inhabit.

The three books we’ve chosen sit along a spectrum - we’ve sequenced them from the broadest in scope to the most contemporary in method.

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The Mark I Perceptron machine, the first implementation of the perception algorithm. Cornell Aeronautical Lab, 1960.

Start with Irrational Exuberance; This is Shiller’s landmark work — a data-rich, historical argument that markets routinely deviate from intrinsic value for long stretches of time. Originally written around the dot-com boom (and later updated), the book blends price history, valuation metrics, and behavioural evidence to show how speculative episodes form and why they persist. Do note that the idea is not to predict crashes for fun; it is to demonstrate that investor psychology creates waves and cycles that no rational-agent model can fully explain.

Then read Animal Spirits by George Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller. If Irrational Exuberance shows that markets misbehave, Animal Spirits explains why. Drawing on Keynes’ idea of the same name, Akerlof and Shiller explore trust, fairness, narratives of confidence, and the emotional impulses that shape economic decision-making. The book argues that macroeconomic thinking must account for the stories, norms, and instincts that drive real choices. It’s short, readable, and surprisingly applicable to everyday financial behaviour.

Close with Narrative Economics. This is Shiller’s most recent contribution, illustrating the idea that economic narratives behave like epidemics - they spread, mutate, compete, and shape market outcomes. Bitcoin optimism, housing panic, inflation fears, “this time is different” thinking are all contagious stories that move people before numbers do. Shiller mixes economic history, behavioural insights, and even epidemiological models to illustrate this fresh perspective — markets as living systems, and not just mechanisms of price discovery.

Depending on which idea resonates most…you could branch into behavioural finance (Kahneman and Thaler), or into the sociology of financial manias (Kindleberger).

That’s it for this month from us. If you’re new and want the next issue of Odyssey in your inbox, subscribe above. Share this with people you know who are curious about everything at the intersection of tech, VC, and innovation in India.