In 1969, an Ahmedabad chemist named Karsanbhai Patel began selling a detergent powder called Nirma at ₹3.50 a kilo, at a time when HUL’s Surf cost ₹13. He didn’t invent detergent, but by making it affordable to almost every household,…
In January 1979, the Shah of Iran boarded a plane out of Tehran and never returned. In the revolution that followed, much of Iran’s oil industry shut down, and crude prices roughly doubled around the world. India depended heavily on…
In 1998, a midsize American manufacturing company invited its employees to meet a retirement consultant, one at a time. The company still asks to remain anonymous. The consultant gave everyone the same message: you are not saving enough, and here…
In 1964, an Indian who wanted to own a piece of the stock market without picking shares had exactly one place to go. The Unit Trust of India, set up in 1963, launched its first scheme, Unit Scheme 1964 or…
In the spring of 1956, two brothers in their eighties sat down with their lawyer in San Francisco. They owned a small chain of newspapers on the California peninsula. They were ready to retire, and they had a decision to…
In 2017, in a rented warehouse outside Hamburg, two German entrepreneurs ran an experiment that 650 people showed up for. Just eight kilometres of running, broken into segments, each one followed by a punishing task: pushing a loaded sled, carrying…
In 1994, doctors began studying a woman they would only ever call S.M., a woman who, as far as anyone could tell, was afraid of absolutely nothing. For the next two decades, researchers at the University of Iowa tried everything…
A few nights ago, three of my friends nearly got into an argument over dinner. One, a die-hard Delhi loyalist, went on about the winters, the food, the sheer scale of the city, and how everything important in the country…
In December 1966, a shipment of wheat sat somewhere in the Atlantic, and an Indian official in Washington was waiting on a phone call to find out if it would be released. This wasn’t unusual. It happened most months that…
Sandeep Pai sells fire extinguishers for a living in Mumbai. In 2007, at the peak of a roaring bull market, he put a good part of his savings into a basket of mid-cap stocks. When the crash came the following…