In Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings, there exists a handful of crystal orbs that possess immense powers. These orbs allowed their possessor to communicate across vast distances and view events that were occurring anywhere in Middle-earth. But one of the orbs was later obtained by the series’ main antagonist to conquer the entire Middle-earth. Tolkien named these orbs Palantíri (seeing stones). This influenced four young men to brand their tech company, which would later

India is the most populous country in the world, the second-largest economy in Asia after China, and the nation that guided a spacecraft to the lunar South Pole on a budget smaller than a Hollywood blockbuster. It built a payment infrastructure so seamless that a fruit vendor in Varanasi and a startup founder in Bengaluru share the same digital wallet. It is, by almost every measure, a country that has learned to live at the speed of data. Illustration by The Geostrata And it

An epochal building block of a nation’s foundation is its sovereignty. Free from external influence, countries have the authority to...