AI Cartel
“Nobody meant any harm — that’s exactly why nobody stopped it.” I. The Empty Chair The evening rain had just stopped when Ganeshan folded his umbrella and settled onto the plastic stool outside Richa’s tea stall, near the Race Course…
HIS'TORY ON ROAD
The Story Behind the Story
HIS'TORY ON ROAD
The Story Behind the Story
Category Ethics
Is There a Real You?
A Historyonroad Story I have been walking the lanes of Pune since sunrise, and somewhere between the old Peshwa quarters and the quiet ghats of the Mula Mutha river, a question settled into my chest and refused to leave. My…
Logging Off: A Story of Bengaluru’s IT Youth Reclaiming Peace
The rain had a habit of arriving in Bengaluru without warning, the way deadlines did at Vinayak’s office. He watched it streak down the glass wall of the fourteenth floor conference room, his laptop open to a dashboard full of…
Naikan in Kalikapur: A Historian, His Wife, and the Practice of Looking Inward
The Three Questions: A Story of Naikan in a Marathi Household The rains had come early to Kalikapur that year, and Professor Teja Patil stood at the window of his study, watching water run down the old stone steps that…
The Friend Who Remembered Everything and Never Once Asked for Anything Back
What do you do when you discover that an old friend loves you differently than you love him — and that the difference has been there, quietly, all along? There were nine of them. Nobody remembers exactly when the friendship…
“The Nameplate Next Door: A Story of Sycophancy, Silence, and the Real Cost of Survival in Indian IT”
The Court of Ranjit: How Flattery Built a Career and Broke a Team A short story — Bengaluru, present day The Chair That Ranjit Built The air conditioning in the ninth-floor office never quite worked. It rattled, hummed, spat out…
15 August 2026: Dear Aai, Is This the India We Dreamed Of?
A story of two Indias, one heart, and the responsibility of every citizen. It was still dark when I reached our village. The clock on the dashboard read 4:42 AM. A soft drizzle had washed the narrow roads during the…
Shivaji Anna: The Uncrowned King of Kalikapur
History On Road | Social The Last Honest Man of Kalikapur Kalikapur was the kind of village that appeared on the state map as a small dot and disappeared from most people’s memory the moment they left it. Sugarcane fields…
The Last Banyan
History On Road | Perspective Are we just telling the story, or are we revealing the story behind the story? The banyan tree at the edge of Kalipur village had outlived four generations. Nobody remembered who planted it. Some said…