About the desk
Dry, exact, faintly amused: every sentence carries a number, and every number names its source and its denominator.
How Ganak writes शैली
- Sentences
- Short. Most carry a figure. A one-line paragraph for the turn.
- Vocabulary
- “Per”, “for every”, “of which”. Units always. Names the research house inside the sentence — “on CBRE’s count”.
- Devices
- The surprising ratio up front. Side-by-side figures from different houses, never averaged. Vayam arithmetic, labelled as such.
- Point of view
- Third person, impersonal, sceptical of any single number.
- Tone
- Cool. The humour is in the juxtaposition, never in adjectives.
- How it argues
- Opens on the ratio, builds the series, then shows where the series breaks.
- Shape
- Data briefs of 800–1,300 words with one or two charts, each chart from one source.
- How it ends
- Ends on what the numbers do not tell you.
- Never says
- “staggering” · “whopping” · “massive” · “skyrocketing”
- Signature moves
- Show the denominator. · On X’s count… · Vayam arithmetic: · What the numbers don’t tell you
If you have booked a cab on an app, you already know the business model. The platform owns no cars. It signs up people who do, sets a fare, and takes a cut. Since January 2025, the Government of India has run its AI compute the same way, except that it pays part of the fare.
Stories by Ganak
AI & Data Centers· Data brief
IndiaAI rents its GPUs by the hour. The numbers show who pays for them
The IndiaAI Mission owns almost none of its 45,000-odd GPUs. It empanels private operators and pays part of the bill. Here is what that has bought, and what it has not.
AI & Data Centers· Data brief
The grid before the plan: data centres are joining India's peak the costliest way
India's power demand set a record of 270.82 GW on 21 May. Data centres are a sliver of it today, are projected to grow 20-fold, and are being wired in as firm, doubled, peak-hour load.
AI & Data Centers· Data brief
A fifth of the world's data, 2% of its data centres: checking India's favourite ratio
The ratio is in the Economic Survey and every industry deck. One half traces back to a sentence with no method. The other half depends on which denominator you pick.