Assets
Interactive essays, explorers, and reference material from Chirag Patnaik.
The oil windfall: twelve years, ₹21.8 lakh crore
Cumulative central excise extracted above the FY12 tax regime, FY12-FY26. Twelve years, two finance ministers, one through-line.
Petrol and the rupee: not the story you think
The pump price doesn't track the rupee. It tracks tax policy. Fifteen years of data, decomposed.
2047 arithmetic
The 2047 target has receded every year. The regime no longer agrees with itself on the number. A look at the math behind the slogan and the lifecycle of the rhetoric.
The name of India
How Sindhu became Hinduš became Indós became India, and how the same word, once misused by a lost Genoese, came to label the indigenous peoples of two continents.
Off the books — India's hidden fiscal stack, 2002–2026
Twenty-four years of off-budget borrowing, by instrument and government. Vajpayee's ₹9,000 cr oil pool bonds to the Modi-era ₹13 lakh cr stack across FCI-NSSF, NHAI, IRFC, bank recap, AIAHL.
Storytelling fidelity — the same number, four ways
The same financial story told as markdown, static HTML, Excel+PPT, and interactive HTML+JS. The reader feels the gap.
The vanity metric
India's biggest export category — mobile phones — is a pass-through. Components imported, phones exported, citizens taxed at 18% to fund the photograph.
The salaried Indian got poorer
A decade of working-class prices alongside salaried wages. Prices rose 64%, wages did not keep up. The crossover happened around demonetisation, the bottom was COVID, the salaried class has not recovered.
Contractor Raj
A forensic look at India's contractor-led growth model: how the State became the dominant customer for capex, how it was paid for, and what was already visible in the data before the West Asia crisis.
Workings — algorithms in motion
Companion to The Algorithm Atlas. Forty-seven specimens animated step by step — code on the left, structure on the right, controls below.
The Buddhist world, 5c BCE – 18c CE
From Bamiyan to Bagan, Borobudur to Bulguksa — 500 ancient Buddhist sites mapped across Asia, with the patron dynasties that built them.
Strip the props
Twenty-two years of headline Indian GDP versus the underlying fundamentals, plus how the public capex was paid for. Twelve charts, one closed loop.
The Algorithm Atlas
Twenty-three families of algorithms, four hundred and forty-four specimens. Each labelled with what it does and, more importantly, when you'd reach for it instead of its neighbour.
Robotics — A Field Guide
Thirteen layers of metal, signal, and silicon. From the actuator to the humanoid moment — every layer of the modern robot, animated.
Income vs outcomes — thirteen states on one canvas
Per-capita income against literacy and child survival across thirteen Indian states, with a toggle to add overseas remittances back in. Two states sit clearly off-trend.
The Semiconductor Field Guide
From transistor to package — twelve layers of the chip industry, animated. Architectures, lithography, memory, power, geopolitics, and where most chips actually live.
India — 2500 years to the Republic
An interactive atlas of subcontinental history — 203 events from 518 BCE to 1992 CE pinned on a map, walked by threads, traced through 32 lives, and gathered into 14 thematic collections.
India grain policy, state by state
Rice and millet area, procurement, groundwater stress, and crop-switching potential across 20 states — district-level data, interactive explorer.
Rice to ethanol: the groundwater flow
Where India's 54.5 Mt of procured rice went in 2024–25 — and how much irrigation water the ethanol allocation exports as motor fuel.
The Indian Rail Travel Ladder — 1971 to 2027
Fifty years of Railways passenger data as a proxy for income distribution — 10 classes, three granularity layers, sliding window zoom.
The demographic change story is misplaced
Fertility has collapsed across every religion in India. The Hindu–Muslim gap has more than halved — geography now explains fertility far better than religion does.
ML Explainers
33 interactive explainers across architecture, training, inference, and reasoning — attention, LoRA, vLLM, speculative decoding, RLHF, and more.
Systems of the Subcontinent
Thirty-five governance systems of the Indian subcontinent, from gana-sangha republics to constitutional federalism — searchable and filterable.
Rolling Returns Explorer
What you'd have actually earned holding Nifty 50 or Bank Nifty for 1, 3, 5, 10 years — starting on any day since 2007.
India 2030 — The Standstill Scenarios
If the rupee drifts to 120 and real growth holds at 6%, where does India's USD GDP land by FY30? An interactive scenario modeler.
Lok Sabha Delimitation Explorer
Five formulas for distributing an expanded 850-seat Lok Sabha across India's states — whose vote gets heavier, whose gets lighter.
Women in the Legislature, by Ticket Not by Seat
India's reservation debate, the European evidence, and the design tensions that won't go away.
Regex Derivatives
Watch a regular expression match a string, one character at a time, via Brzozowski derivatives.
Reflections
Every 3D rotation is the composition of at most three reflections. Pick one, watch it factor.
EML Explorer
One binary operator, one constant, and every elementary function falls out — an interactive look at the eml operator.
India's Monsoon, Year by Year
126 years of summer monsoon performance by meteorological subdivision — the all-India number is a fig leaf; the variance is the story.
Tax the Commute, Not the Commuter
A proposal to tax companies per the distance their employees commute — the arguments for, the objections against, and the mechanism.
A Model of Human Attention
How attention works as a fixed budget — categories competing for a share, brand cycling within categories, and what converts attention into purchase intent.
Corporate Commons Contributions Explorer
How corporations across the US, Japan, China, EU, and India contribute to the global commons — filterable by country and industry.