Narendra Nag

I’ve always believed that a good library tells you something about the person who built it. Not just what they read, but how they think about the world — what they consider important, what they want to understand, what they return to. So I built one. Ten thousand books, curated by hand (with some help from Claude), spanning everything from Dostoevsky to detective fiction, from quantum physics to Vikram Chandra.

I’ve been thinking about attention a lot lately. Not the corporate buzzword kind. The real kind — the kind where someone picks up their phone, opens a Wikipedia page, checks the box score, looks up ticket prices, or scrolls through YouTube highlights at 1am. That kind of attention. If you work in sports media, you already know that measuring this stuff is weirdly hard. TV ratings are delayed and incomplete. Social media follower counts are vanity metrics. And gut feeling? Well, my gut has b...

There’s an old saying on Wall Street: when oil moves, everything moves. Energy costs ripple through supply chains, consumer spending, corporate margins — the whole machine. But how tightly coupled is that relationship, really? And does it depend on the stock you’re looking at? I wanted to find out, so I built a thing.

Introduction: The Illusion of Total Flux Today, on July 3rd 2025, we have tipped over and are closer to 2050 than we are to the year 2000. I think this is a good time to take stock. We are living through a compounding inflection — a stack of discontinuities that, in prior eras, might each have defined a generation, but which today are unfolding in parallel. AI is moving from narrow to general applications faster than policy can respond. Bioengineering has leapt from theoretical to actionabl...

Through October, we were shocked, shocked I say, to see all these people watch free sports. I mean, we were told that streaming free sports is a BAAAAD idea — fans WANT to pay another subscription fee because the only way to show REAL support for a sports team is via their wallet. Also, no advertiser would want to advertise on a free service. Why would they! /rant Here’s what’s been happening. On the sports streaming service I am part of in my day job — Victory+ — we are seeing many times t...

I started solving crosswords in high school. Newspapers were a daily essential back in the nineties (the last century!) and we used to get the Times of India. It had (and still carries) a pretty decent crossword — I don’t remember where it was syndiated from, but it may have been from The Times newspaper in the UK. I can’t remember clearly why I started, but I started. I remember getting more regular with a few years later as a way to spend time on a morning commute. I’d sit in a bus and tun...

The slow, but increasingly inevitable, demise of the RSN model is forcing sports franchises and leagues to think about how they reach (and engage) with their fans. I don’t blame them for wanting the tried and tested way of doing things to continue — who wouldn’t. A cheque from a TV station is simpler than spending time (and money) getting fans to watch every game. Just like an old-school TV distribution monopoly that guarantees a Nielsen rating, is a lot easier than making sure the game is a...

As someone who loves to travel and has lived in various places around the world, I wanted to create a fun and interactive way to showcase all the locations I’ve visited or lived in. The idea was simple: build a map that allows me to pin every place I’ve been to, highlight my current location, and share it with friends and family. The Inspiration Mapping out my travels on a physical map has always been satisfying, but I wanted something more dynamic, something that could grow with every new ...

July 9th, 1990. My first day at a new middle school. I was the only one who didn’t show up. I had stayed up into the wee hours of the morning watching Lothar Matthäus’s Germany beat Maradona’s Argentina 1-0 in the Fifa World Cup final. Highlights I realise this gives away a lot about me. Yes, I didn’t grow up in America. And yes, I watched way too much TV on a tiny black and white set. (Quick aside: My memory may be playing tricks on me, but the Macbook Air I’m writing this out on feels lik...

The only truly finite asset is human attention — to be able to capture it is the single most important objective for both publishers and brands. For publishers, producing content that has a user’s attention is the key to monetization — whether via subscriptions, advertising or both. For brands, accessing that attention and holding on to it via an ad and message that stays with a user is the key to success. Given this, I think understanding how attention works is critically important and, I...

It’s been twenty-five years since I published my first personal site. That first attempt can still be found in the internet archive, and the braver amongst you can go have a look. After spending time on Blogger, Medium and multiple false starts over the year, I finally decided it’s time to do this properly, once and for all. Here’s my stack: I’m hosting this on Github Pages I’ve got Jekyll up and running to generate the site And I’ve going to spend time with Claude and ChatGPT figuring out...

Khawar, or KB as he insists on being called, has been teaching people how to become Cisco Networking experts for thirty-odd years. Here’s a pretty representative review: “Teaching Style — His explanations are EXCELLENT. He has a way of explaining the “why” of different concepts in a way that makes a light bulb go off over your heard.” Katherine McNamara When we spoke to him the first time earlier this year, we started to get a sense of the real tyranny of aggregation platforms lik...

In the year 2000 I was transitioning from running an independent web-design shop to working as a reporter for a traditional newspaper. In 2020, I find myself leading a team trying to build and launch the most advanced video platform as a service this world has ever seen. In these last twenty years, I have seen computers upend newsooms, digital upend marketing, and now mobile upend entertainment. Along the way, I have started up, worked at startups and large companies, been acquihired, built ...

I was recently asked to recommend the books a person starting up should read. It got me thinking about the books that have influenced me the most. So here’s a living list — I’ll add to it every time I read something seminal. And I’m adding videos of talks (usually by the author) where available. No Logo Naomi Klein Video The Ascent of Money Niall Ferguson Video Antifragile Nicholas Nassem Taleb Video Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan Vide...