Daybreak - Daybreak 2025: Four stories we slowed down for

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

This episode is a look back at four Daybreak, The Ken stories that stayed with us in 2025.After three years of making the show, a few episodes each year stand out because they captured something shifting beneath the surface. These four did exactly that.Host and producer Snigdha Sharma revisits a conversation feat. Waterfield Advisor's Soumya Rajan about why even India’s wealthiest women still fight for financial control, how China’s rare earth dominance exposed the fragility of India’s EV push, the global silver crunch that linked AI, clean energy, and everyday prices, and India's AI future.Tune in. 

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. After three years of making daybreak, I've realized something. When you do this every day, most episodes blur together.

And that's not a bad thing. It is the nature of daily news. You move fast, you publish, and then, you do this. you move on. But every year, a few stories refuse to fade. They stay with you because they capture a moment, a kind of a turning point that tells you where things are headed. So in this episode, I thought I would take you back to four such moments. One was triggered by breaking news. China had tightened rare earth exports and suddenly exposed how fragile India's EV ambitions really are. Another came from our 500th episode idea where my co-host Rahil and I stepped back to us why even some of India's wealthiest women still struggle for real financial control.

Another was a deep dive into a global silver crunch that revealed how AI, clean energy and everyday prices are now tightly intertwined. And one came from a growing discomfort that I could not shake off about the idea of India's AI moment and about whether we are actually building the technology that will define our future or we're just consuming it. As different as these stories were, they shared a common thread. Each one caught a sector at an inflection point, moments that will shape how money, energy, materials and technology evolves in the years ahead. Personally, too, these stories matter to me because they did not offer comfort or closure. They forced us to sit with uncertainty and to ask harder questions and to acknowledge just how much of the future is still undecided. And that is to me the real work of our podcast Daybreak.

We're not chasing answers, but we're trying to understand the forces that shape what is coming next. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nika Sharma and I Don't Chase the News Cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 30th of December. Even in India's richest households, many women still have to fight for financial independence. Not because they do not have money, but because they do not always have control, confidence,

or a seat at the table. And that is why Rahel and I knew this was the right conversation for our 500 episode of daybreak. We wanted to mark the milestone by asking a deceptively simple question, what does financial empowerment actually look like for women who already have wealth? And to do that, we spoke to Somia Rajan, one of the most influential founders in India's wealth management industry and the CEO of Waterfield Advisors, which manages billions of dollars for some of the country's richest families.

What made this episode really special was understanding why Somia felt the need to start heritage, which is a separate wealth advisory firm just for women. Turns out, it was in response to a glaring gap in the market. Over decades, Somia realized that even the best wealth advisors were operating on assumptions that are built around male life parts, uninterrupted careers, linear earning, clear risk appetites. Women's realities did not fit into this template. And the data from Waterfield's Women of Wealth Survey kind of reinforced this. These women were not passive inheritors or reluctant investors. They were thoughtful, they were goal-oriented, and they understood

diversification. But they still struggled with access, financial literacy and authority over their own money. And that contradiction really stayed with me. What made this episode even more important was not just the numbers, but the realization that financial independence and financial confidence are not the same thing, even at the highest levels of wealth. I remember exactly why the next episode that I'm going to talk about happened. Usually on daybreak we do not chase breaking news. But in early June this year, it felt like the news was chasing us. Suddarshan Veno of TvS Motors went on television and basically set out loud what the industry had been worrying about quietly. That China tightening exports of rare earth magnets

could bring India's EV production to a grinding halt. Then Bajaj Auto echoed the same fear. And that is when it became impossible to ignore. What struck me was how fragile the whole EV story suddenly felt. We talk about clean energy and electric mobility like they're inevitable. But in this episode, I realized how dependent that future is on a handful of materials that most people never think about, and on one country that controls them almost end to end. While researching for the story, I stumbled into Bayan Obo, which is in Inner Mongolia. I remember opening Google Maps and just staring at it.

It did not look like a mine. It looked like a wound on the surface of the earth. And the more I read about Batu, the refining hub next door, the toxic lake, the pollution, the harder it became to keep thinking about rare earths as just another supply chain problem. This episode really changed the way I think about green transition. Because the uncomfortable truth is that China did not win the rare earth's game by accident. It won because it was willing to absorb environmental damage that the rest of the world refused to touch. And now everybody is stuck choosing between dependence and destruction.

Which is why for India, there were no neat answers. We have some reserves. We are trying to build capacity, but refining scale and time are massive constraints. And recycling sounds promising, but it is nowhere near ready. So this episode stayed with me because, it captured the core paradox of our types. Saving the planet actually depends on processes that are quietly destroying parts of it. And there is no clean way out of that contradiction. So this particular episode is one of my favorites because firstly, it was an original piece. And secondly, it was quite a difficult one for me to execute. It's called Inside the Metal Markets Most Surprising Meltdown. And it's basically about when silver hit like sky high prices during

Diwali and there was like a huge shortage right and I remember it took me an entire day just to get the basics of like silver trading and supply in order before I could even start the script so that was quite fun you know learning about this space that I didn't know much about and I'm also really fond of how this episode came together because the more I researched the more I could see like a story unfold like how AI and EV and solar like all of these new age economic changes were coming together to, you know, affect the supply of silver and how this supply had actually not been meeting demand for years, but in this year specifically, because obviously, you know, we've seen like a huge burst in these kind of technologies, it was even worse. And I think it really captured

that moment in time very well about how all these different changes were coming together and really affecting the lives of like common people as well because nobody like Diwali as a season where people buy a lot of jewelry and precious metals, didn't have access to this, right? And then it was cool to be able to demonstrate also how like silver ETF trading, which is not something everyone knows about, is connected to the cost of the phone that you are listening to this episode on. So, yeah, that was like a really fun, cool episode to work on and also a difficult one.

So I'm really happy with how that turned out. Yep, I agree with Rachel. On the surface, this was a story about silver, a metal that most of us don't even think much, about, especially in India where gold gets all the attention. But the more Rachel dug into it, the clearer it became that this was not just a commodity story. It was a story about how modern economies break. The episode connected so many dots in a really satisfying way for me, from AI to EVs to solo panels to ETFs and to why a silver bracelet suddenly costs more during the festive season. And turns out, none of it was obvious at the start. I also

I also really like how Rachel took something technically dense like silver trading and stockpiling and made it feel intuitive and grounded in everyday life. Because by the end of the episode, I could actually see how a policy decision in the US or a shortage in mining shows up in your phone on your electricity bill and even your jewelry bill. So this is an episode Snigda produced and it's easily one of my favorites from the year. It's called The AI Running India Isn't Indian. can that still change? So it was basically about India's like sovereign AI mission and, you know, like a comparison of how that's going to how China and South Korea are doing their own sovereign AI. And I like this episode because I think on daybreak, we mostly cover highly specific, usually micro stories. They're about, usually about specific companies or specific events.

So it's very interesting when we get to take a step back and look at like macro stories. Like even the Silver episode, for example. So this one I'm particularly fond of for two reasons. So last week I did a quick summary of all our AI episodes of the year and we did like 15. So obviously AI as a subject has been quite top of mind for everybody, not just us. And of course, even when it comes to news about your open AIs and Googles, it's always, when we cover it, it's always in the Indian context and when you read about it, it's usually India or by extension, of course, the US.

But here in this story, we were talking about India specifically and then China and South Korea. And it was really interesting to learn about all the developments that were happening in these locations because these aren't really the stories you hear about in mainstream news. And especially the depth that Snickda goes into to explain why sovereign AI is important and how these specific countries are doing it. And it's short like a path for how India can do it. And also how it's not exactly matching up to the potential that exists, right? because if these countries can do it and like China did with deep seek for less capital, it's obviously something that India can also do like all the ingredients are there.

So especially when you think about where India wants to be with AI, it's very important to know what we're talking about when we talk about sovereign AI and to understand that there is potential that's out there. And, you know, we might get to it. We might not. And I think I really like how Sinkta ended that episode also by saying that it's really something that we have to wait and watch. And we're running a risk of it becoming more of a slogan than an actual practice when it comes to sovereign AI.

And yeah, I think those were really interesting insights. And it's always fun to learn more about geographies that you don't really discuss when it comes to these topics. So what I really wanted to do with this episode was to actually slow down the conversation. Because when we talk about AI in India, we usually. jump straight to adoption, like how fast it is spreading, how many startups are using it, how many users we have. But actually, AI sovereignty is more about control than usage. Who owns the models? Who sets the defaults and who captures the long-term value? Looking at what South Korea and China are doing and have done made the gap impossible to ignore.

And the difference is that they treated AI like infrastructure, not just software. compute capital coordination all moving together. In India, those pieces are still fragmented. And that is the uncomfortable part of this moment. We are not behind on talent or ambition. We are behind on capacity. And capacity is much harder to build once foreign systems become deeply embedded. This episode mattered because it reframed AI from a tech story into a political economic one.

Not are we using AI, but whose AI are we building our future on? And that distinction is going to define India's digital power for decades. So you see, each of these episodes froze a moment just before something important changed. And that is exactly where I want daybreak to live. I will add the links of each of the episodes that I mentioned in the show notes. Thank you for listening. And I hope you all have a great. here in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv CN.