00 Interests, Enthusiasms & Expertise

Reads for
the pattern.

Not a résumé — a map of what actually holds his attention. Thirteen years of reading, a decade of essays, two manuscripts and a habit of borrowing rigorous disciplines as metaphors for everything else.

Behavioural Economics AI — Practice & Critique Institutional Forensics Sanskrit Philosophy Place-Writing
02 Throughlines

Six habits
of mind.

The same instincts recur regardless of subject — whether he's reading a corporate document, a city, or a chart of last year's biggest songs.

01

Systems before campaigns.

Behavioural economics and choice architecture are his longest-running theoretical investment — the largest sustained category across thirteen years of reading. A plan is an engineered system of triggers and occasions, not a sequence of executions.

02

A forecast is worth less than the forecaster's record.

A standing suspicion of confident futurism — visible in a persistent counter-collection of failed predictions, and argued directly in a three-part essay series applying Newton's laws of motion to how trends actually behave (the published overview: The Newtonian Nature of Trends).

03

Every rigorous discipline is a metaphor waiting to be borrowed.

Trained in biochemistry before communications, he reaches for immunology to describe cultural sameness — antigens, antibodies, immunity — and classical mechanics to describe how a trend starts, distorts and dies.

04

Sameness is the risk, not the safety.

The same argument made three times over — in advertising, where campaigns converge on the same moodboards; in music, where the charts sound alike; and in institutions, where every transformation programme reads like the last one.

05

A city, a document and an agency are read the same way.

Institutional forensics and place-writing are the same underlying habit, aimed at different subjects — reading Kolkata, Mumbai, Los Angeles or a holding company's annual report for what it reveals without meaning to.

06

High performance has a cost worth naming.

A recurring personal-philosophy thread — on fearlessness, on the discipline of continuing regardless, on what it costs to keep performing — that runs from essay writing directly into a completed manuscript.

03 Territory

Ten domains,
held long enough.

Not a skills list — a map of where the attention actually goes, and what evidence backs each claim.

Behavioural economics & systems thinking

The theoretical bedrock under everything else — choice architecture, nudge theory, decision friction.

AI — practice and critique

An early enthusiast tracking the field since 2013, now writing as a sceptic of what AI governance and guardrails quietly reveal.

Algorithmic homogenisation & distinctiveness

The ANTIGENERIC thesis — culture, advertising and music treated as one convergence problem.

Institutional & agency forensics

A decade spent reading holding companies and agencies through their own documents rather than their showreels.

Trend theory & forecasting scepticism

The Newton's-laws essays; a standing argument that most trend work is bought on confidence rather than accuracy.

High-agency psychology

Performance-preserved depression and "Command Mode" — using Achilles, Arjuna, Hamlet and Churchill as mirrors.

Sanskrit & Buddhist philosophy

Fearlessness (abhaya) held as a live philosophical question, not an academic one.

Vedic astrology & palmistry (Jyotisha)

A standing personal practice of reading pattern in an entirely different register from the professional one.

Place-writing & psychogeography

Kolkata, Mumbai, Los Angeles, Goa and Darjeeling, each read as a text with its own argument.

Music, poetry & sound

Sufi qawwali to death metal to Derek Walcott — a deliberately wide, unresolved palette.

04 In numbers

The territory,
quantified.

The same map from the last two sections, with the raw counts behind it.

823Items in the reading archive, 2013 – 2026
13Years the archive runs, unbroken
55%Of the archive saved across just four years — 2016 to 2019
16Bookmarks saved in Feb 2025 — the month the sameness thesis took shape
30+Essays published at words.sidht.com
2Completed manuscripts, both prepublication
95Neologisms coined for the ANTIGENERIC vocabulary
1,400+Ebooks catalogued outside the bookmark archive
05 Current explorations

What the essays
are working through.

Recent output at words.sidht.com, read as a set of live threads rather than a back-catalogue.

01

The AI cluster

A running argument rather than a single essay — on model duality, on what three different "year in AI" reports reveal about his own usage, and on the Juvenal question applied to AI guardrails: who governs the governors.
02

The Darjeeling diptych

A two-part piece written from home ground, on youth migration and what a music festival could do for a hill town's cultural and economic gravity.
03

Newton's laws of trend

First Law: the things that refuse to die · Second Law: the lie of the trigger · Third Law: the strange afterlife of cultural energy
Classical mechanics rebuilt as a theory of how cultural trends actually move — inertia, force, and equal-and-opposite reaction, applied to fads, virality and backlash.
04

Pathogen Lab

The ANTIGENERIC vocabulary — ninety-five neologisms built for the book — turned into a playable interactive game, published on the experimental wing of his site.
05

Two manuscripts, moving in parallel

One on cultural and commercial sameness, one on the psychology of people who keep performing while struggling invisibly — both complete, both prepublication.
06 Original work

Built out of
the curiosity.

Manuscripts, an essay practice, a salon, and a habit of turning arguments into things you can use.

ANTIGENERIC

Completed manuscript — thirteen chapters, five "pathogens," a sensing-to-immunity structure.

When Lions Get the Blues

Completed manuscript, roughly 213 pages, coining "performance-preserved depression" and "Command Mode."

words.sidht.com

An active essay practice — thirty-plus published pieces across advertising, AI, place, philosophy, music and politics.

The 3rd Space

An intellectual salon he founded in Siliguri.

Course design

Three proposed university courses — The Post-Algorithm Marketer, Insurgent Strategy, and AI & The Creative Industry.

play.sidht.com

A standing sandbox for small interactive experiments, including Pathogen Lab.

365 Days Wrapped

The whole year sorted by hand into eleven themes and fifty ranked words — the raw archive behind this page.

07 Reference points

Names that
recur.

Across the reading, the bookmarks and the essays, the same voices keep returning.

Kahneman, Thaler, Rory Sutherland
Behavioural economics and the case for it in advertising
Alex Murrell
"The Age of Average" — the moodboard critique that seeded the ANTIGENERIC thesis
Millward Brown / Ehrenberg-Bass
The brand-growth-science literature behind his planning instincts
Roberto Calasso
"Ka" — referenced in his writing on liminality and myth
Derek Walcott
"Love After Love" — a standing point of return in his poetry reading
Juvenal
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes — the frame for his AI-governance writing
Venkatesh Rao
"Premium mediocre" — borrowed for his reading of Los Angeles
The Iliad, the Gita, Hamlet, Churchill
The mirrors used throughout When Lions Get the Blues