Welcome to your Weekend!

A few years ago, I went to India to see two friends get hitched on a beach in Goa, a ceremony that, like much of the country, offered a rich blend of ancient and modern. On that trip, I met the bride’s grandmother—Aaji to all, the Marathi term for your mom’s mom—and as I’ve seen her more since, I’ve come to treasure the stories she shares. She’s nearly 90, so they span an enormous breadth of time, tumult and transformation: tales of Partition, Bombay modernizing into Mumbai, the children she taught English to.

I wonder what Aaji would think about the transformation Anita Raghavan, a returning Weekend contributor and former Wall Street Journal reporter, so neatly describes in this week’s Big Read. As Anita shows, India’s long-awaited e-commerce revolution may finally be arriving—courtesy of billionaire Nadan Nilekani, not Amazon and Walmart, both long stymied in India. 

You probably don’t know Nilekani, but he has lived a remarkable existence. He co-founded Infosys, the global IT giant, in the 1980s—an “era when people, even Indians, looked down upon things made in India as being shoddy,” Anita recalled. “Until that time, probably India’s greatest export was manhole covers.” After stepping down as CEO in 2007, he authored a bestselling book about India—and appeared on “The Daily Show” to talk about it. Beyond his book, he has spent other parts of his post-CEO life humbly rolling up his sleeves and working in government projects from a ground-floor level. It’s hard to picture many American founder billionaires doing the same—just imagine Jeff Bezos giving up Blue Origin for government bureaucracy.

Nilekani hopes that his latest project, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, which combines both the public and private sectors, will spark an e-commerce boom for India. He won’t earn anything from it. Rather, he’s in it for the chance to “get everyone in the game,” he told Anita. “That’s how you keep harmony.” Surely a sentiment Aaji—any aaji, really—would like.—Abram Brown

The Big Read

The Bill Gates of India Has a Grand Plan to Outfox Amazon—and Change the World

When Nandan Nilekani arrived to see Anita in Bangalore, “the first thing that struck me is that he came to the interview unaccompanied—without the line of attendants that usually accompany powerful people in India,” she recalled. “Another thing that struck me, again in contrast to the Indian business titans I have encountered, is that he was always responsive to email—much like Warren Buffett.” 

Through her reporting, Anita emerged with a sense that Nilekani’s ambitious e-commerce project would indeed work. At a simple level, “it is an initiative that is supported by the Indian government, and it has the backing of powerful people like Nilekani,” Anita pointed out. “Of course, it will take time, and there will be bumps on the road, but its success is important both politically and economically.”

The Top 5

The Very Best Executive Coaches

Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg have all employed a coach, underscoring the point made by this piece from our Annie Goldsmith: Everyone can use some advice—even the greats. 

“I’m honestly surprised we don’t hear more about executive coaches—it completely aligns with the Silicon Valley optimization culture of the past few years,” Annie said. “If you’re shelling out for a taekwondo coach and someone to tell you what vitamins to take—obviously you’d pay someone to tell you how to do your job better.”

Listening: The Night’s Watch 

Most TV podcasts from a show’s network generally remind me of all the mid behind-the-scenes content that used to fill up a DVD. Yet the latest from HBO, “True Detective: Night Country Podcast,” is as exceptional as the show it covers—thanks to a gold-star casting decision in its host, Alice Qannik Glenn, a native Alaskan podcaster. 

Qannik Glenn has spent years covering the very real issues beneath the sci-fi series’ icy surface: missing and murdered Indigenous women in Alaska, as well as the disproportionate amount of sexual violence they endure. “It’s important for these stories to be heard. We’re all responsible—that’s what drives me,” she said. The “Night Country” podcast nimbly combines interviews with the series’ cast and creator Issa López and ones with real Alaskans who’ve lived in places like Ennis, the fictional town at the show’s center where things go bump-bump-bump in the monthslong night with increasing regularity. “There’s a lot of people that don’t understand life in the Arctic,” Qannik Glenn said, “so to have that contextual information will make you just enjoy the show that much more.”—A.B. 

Watching: Zuck’s Bleak Return to Washington 

I don’t usually consider C-Span appointment television, but I was glued to the network’s livestream on Wednesday of a grimly titled Senate hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.” It began memorably: As the chief executives of Meta Platforms, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X entered the packed hearing room, parts of the crowd audibly hissed at them: The room was filled with victims of online exploitation and the families of deceased victims. 

In many ways, the hearing became an outlet for the public’s generalized outrage at social media companies. (ICYMI: My colleagues have done some strong work on how the technology impacts teen mental health.) Confronting that anger, the CEOs often seemed to offer little more than word salad. Said Mark Zuckerberg: “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industrywide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.” Their lawyers may have given them safe scripts to read, but nothing could save the CEOs from having to face that crowd in Congress, and the raw pain visible on so many faces.—Julia Black

Reading: An AI Bonanza at the Beach

The artificial intelligence gold rush seems to mint a new millionaire every minute these days, but it’s hard to imagine a more unexpected winner from that tech jackpot than the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla. 

Since the ’90s, Anguilla has owned the rights to URLs ending in .ai, meaning any company that wants to use such an URL has to pay it a fee, according to an unexpected report from IEEE Spectrum, a specialist magazine for engineers. The country initially opened up the URLs to non-Anguillians because it expected to sell them to Chinese companies: The word “ài” means “love” in Mandarin. Instead, Silicon Valley companies have flooded Anguilla with offers, and the nation now rakes in $3 million a month from the fees, using the funds to pay down its debt and eliminate property taxes. (For perspective, the country’s entire annual government budget last year was only around $100 million.) The surprise windfall exists as a powerful reminder of how far a Silicon Valley boom can reverberate.—Margaux Maccoll

Makes You Think

Awww, the Beanie Baby generation is all grown up.