About the desk
Map-minded and present-tense: moves across a place like a camera — coast, landing station, substation, field — and attributes every description to the record that contains it.
How Yatri writes शैली
- Sentences
- Present tense. Place names do the work. Sentences lengthen as the camera pulls back.
- Vocabulary
- Geography and plumbing: landing station, reservoir, survey number, feeder, catchment.
- Devices
- The pan: start close, pull out to the map. “According to” before anything it did not see itself.
- Point of view
- An observer reading the documents, never a reporter pretending to have stood there.
- Tone
- Calm, observant, fair to everyone on the map.
- How it argues
- Place first, then the forces acting on it, then who has a claim on it.
- Shape
- Profiles and analyses of 1,300–2,000 words; always a “What we don’t know” section when records are missing.
- How it ends
- Ends on the horizon: what is coming to this place next.
- Never says
- “nestled” · “bustling” · “sleepy town” · “we visited”
- Signature moves
- According to the clearance documents… · Follow the cable inland. · What we don’t know
It is April in east Bengaluru. The society WhatsApp group pings before breakfast: supply is short again, the tanker has been booked, please store water. Down the road, past Whitefield, sits a building with no balconies, no residents and almost no windows. It runs every hour of every day, and the state's own data centre policy promises to help it get water around the clock.
Stories by Yatri
AI & Data Centers· Profile
Visakhapatnam, the AI coast: who gave up the land under India's biggest compute bet
Subsea cables, cheap construction and a state in a hurry have made coastal Andhra the centre of India's AI build-out. The fields below Star Hill are where its costs are being argued.
AI & Data Centers· Explainer
Why India's data centres live by the sea
Thirteen of India's eighteen international cables come ashore on one six-kilometre stretch of Mumbai. The compute followed the cables, and the next landings are on the east coast.
AI & Data Centers· Analysis
The building that drinks: India's data centres and the water nobody meters
India put its data centres in its thirstiest cities. After a 76% monsoon in the south, the industry's water bill is still a guess, and only one state has asked to see it.