Daybreak - India Olympics 2036: It's all fun and games till you become host

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

In Mumbai last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India was entering the bid to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2036. Yup, bidding happens more than a decade before the actual event. Because that’s how long it takes to prep a city for the Olympics. At the same event, PM Modi said hosting the games India is the “age-old dream and aspiration of 140 crore Indians”. You see, the prestige associated with hosting the Olympics is undeniable…many would say, it is priceless. If you think about it, for a developing country, is the ultimate flex, right? But in the end, is it really worth it? Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist does not think so. He has devoted much of his career to exposing the dark underbelly of the Olympics. Tune in. P.S. The Ken podcast team is looking for a talented podcast producer and an audio journalist. If you fit the bill or know someone who does, please apply! 

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 Ganesh, 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 an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts 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. If you look at, for instance, the experience of Rio in 2016, there was a disintegration of the culture of the fabric of the city.

There was rampant corruption. There was bankruptcy for the city. There was evicting 77,000, what are called favelados, of people who live in the shanty towns around Rio. There was a militarization of the city. There was a tremendous fiscal loss of over $20 billion. That was Andrew Zimblerist. He's an American sports economist and an author.

I know it probably sounded like he was describing some sort of crisis situation just now. a riot or an attack of some kind, but he was actually talking about the Summer Olympics that took place in Rio de Janeiro back in 2016. The 2016 Rio Olympic Games were iconic for many reasons. It was the first time that the Olympics were being held in South America. So it was an important opportunity for Brazil to highlight its recent economic growth and social development.

It wanted to sell the idea of Rio as Siddharov. Roger Merivilosa, or the Marvelous City. And as far as the games were concerned, this was the year US gymnast Simone Biles won her first Olympic medal. It was Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's last ever Olympics before he retired. India won only two medals that year. P.V. Sindhu brought home a silver in women's singles badminton, and Saakhi Malik won the bronze in wrestling.

It is true. When you think of the Olympics, you usually think about highlights, like the one that Rahil just mentioned. the world coming together through sport. Medals, the opening ceremony, celebrities, like Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible Theatrics at the closing ceremony of the Olympics earlier this week. Which is why words like militarization,

disintegration of culture, fiscal loss, the words that Andrew just used to describe the city of Rio after the Olympics seemed so hard to associate with how we see the games. Except the dark underbelly of the Olympics that Andrew is talking about, is very well documented. And it isn't just limited to Rio.

This is something that Andrew has been studying for quite some time now across venues. In fact, he has written three whole books on the economics of the Olympics. And the conclusion that he has arrived to is that hosting the Olympics just isn't worth it. You know, you can talk about, it's a nice idea that people come together, but I don't think that's what happens. I think instead people get torn apart by the burden, the financial and the organizational burden and the political burden and the corruption of hosting the games.

Basically, countries bid to host the Olympics, and the country with the most elaborate plan, which usually involves building the fanciest stadiums, infrastructure for athletes, ends up winning. It costs tens of billions of dollars that most host countries don't really have. Which is why more often than not, they spend their years after the games,

more than a decade sometimes, paying off their debt. And yet, we still see countries around the world competing to host the games. And one such country is our own. India. All right, 140-courourer of the world's people, I'd want to be sure to have to be.

that India upon our country on Olympics to join to join that was Prime Minister Modi

at the International Olympic Council's Congress in Mumbai last year he announced that India was entering the bid

to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2036 yep bidding happens more than a decade before the actual event because that's how long

it takes to prep a city for the Olympic Games. At the same event in Mumbai last year, Prime Minister Modi said that hosting the games in India is the age-old dream and aspiration of 140 crore Indians. You see, the prestige associated with hosting the Olympics is undeniable. Many would say it is priceless. If you think about it for a developing country, it is the ultimate flex, right? But in the end, is it really worth it? Hello and welcome to another special episode of Daybreak. I'm Snigda and I'm Rahil and every week we come together to talk about something in business and tech that interests the both of us.

And it won't just be us. Depending on what we're talking about, we will bring a bunch of really interesting people onto the podcast. In this episode, we speak to Professor Andrew Zimbalist. Stay tuned. So Andrew, it's so great having you on Daybreak because I think there are very few people out there who've done as much research as you have on the economics. of the Olympics, right? But before we actually unpack the economics of it all, I actually want to talk about what the games represent in the 21st century, right?

Do you think that the original intent has changed? Like, does it serve the same purpose it did back in 1890s, for instance, when, you know, the first modern Olympics on record was held? Well, I think that Pierre de Koupertan, way back in the 1890s, had one of his major motivations was to improve the military readiness of French society. But another intention was to bring the world's athletes together

and have a wonderful event where people could live together in peace rather than fight on the battlefield. So I think that some of the initial intents have remained, but some of them are different. And when you say it's different, just how different are we talking, Andrew? Well, I don't think that

military preparedness is one of the motivations for the Olympic Games right now. I think the Olympic Games at this point are major sporting spectacle, bring the world's best athletes together, create excitement, demonstrate at least symbolically that the people in the world can work together in peace rather than fighting each other all the time. Right. Andrew, there's also the matter of prestige, right? like, why do so many people believe that hosting the Olympics is a matter of prestige?

Like, what is the meaning of prestige? And does it change when it comes to a developing country hosting the games? Well, I think that the International Olympic Committee or the IOC likes to argue that prestige is bestowed upon the host city, that being on international television, being on the television and community, computer screens of over a billion households around the world is something that promotes the prestige, the brand, the image of the host city. I don't think there's very much evidence on behalf of that argument. And it's particularly problematic when lesser developed cities that have less development of transportation infrastructure, less development of sporting infrastructure,

less development of hospitality infrastructure. It's particularly problematic for those countries because they have a lot more difficulty in pulling off the hosting of the events. They have to invest much more money in building sports facilities and improving their transportation system, et cetera, than the developed cities do. So it's relatively easy. for a city like Paris, or it will be relatively easier for a city like Los Angeles, but much more difficult for a city like Beijing or a city like Sochi or a city like Rio de Janeiro. Right. But Andrew, for a country like China or for Russia, for example, which may not have had that kind of public infrastructure to begin with, right? When they get an opportunity to host an

event like this, then that would mean that these governments and the people, they all have have to come together to make it happen to build this infrastructure that is required to host an event of the scale, which ultimately will be beneficial, no, for the people of the city in the long term. So is that not a good thing? Well, you made a number of assertions there that I don't think empirically have been demonstrated. You can talk about people coming together and how lovely that is, But, you know, it seems to me that if you look at, for instance, the experience of Rio in 2016, there was a disintegration of the culture of the fabric of the city. There was rampant corruption.

There was bankruptcy for the city. There was evicting 77,000 what are called favelados of people who live in the shanty towns around Rio. There was a militarization of the city. there was a tremendous fiscal loss of over $20 billion. So, you know, you can talk about it's a nice idea that people come together, but I don't think that's what happens. I think instead people get torn apart by the burden, the financial and the organizational burden

and the political burden and the corruption of hosting the games. Right. I agree with you on that, Andrew, but let us look at it from the perspective of prestige for a developing country, right? say for example, India. It helps in very significant but intangible ways. So like for a country like India that has been trying so hard to shed this image of being poor, how the world looks at you is very important, right? Maybe it cannot be measured exactly, but it is a matter of reputation. So if you have a good reputation, many good things do follow, no? Even economically, maybe you'll get foreign investments, maybe big businesses will come and want to set up in your country

because they have seen that you're able to pull off an event like the Olympics successfully. So is it not a great way for developing countries to make that sort of step jump into the world stage? Well, again, this is what you just said is very much what the IOC argues. And again, I have to tell you that I think the empirical evidence is not on that side. host the Olympics, and particularly if you're a lesser-developed city, the challenges financially and organizationally and politically are immense. And what happens much more often than not is that the image that you're projecting, the brand that you're projecting out to the world, can be tarnished instead of burnished. It can be hurt. When you have Olympics that have security incidents,

it's hurt. When you have Olympics that have bad weather, it's hurt. when you have Olympics where the athletic village is poorly equipped and doesn't have air conditioning, it's hurt. When the transportation system is bad, it's hurt. So it certainly is not automatic. And just as easily, it can be negative image. It's not automatic for there to be a positive image. And so I think there's a tremendous amount of risk.

It's not to say that if all of the stars align perfectly, that there couldn't be some positive value. But it's more often the case that that doesn't happen and sometimes the case that the reverse happens. We have an exciting announcement to make. If you're a regular listener, you would know that the Ken's podcast have hit many milestones this year. From daybreak, crossing one million downloads to the launch of our first ever premium podcast two by two. We want to keep this momentum going. And for that, we are looking for talented people to join our team. We're looking for a podcast producer to help us produce great narrative-driven shows at the intersection of journalism and business.

We're also looking for an audio journalist who has covered one or more business sectors, ideally careers or education or tech and start-ups for at least two years. If you fit the bill or if you know anybody who does, please check out the link in the show notes. And now, back to the episode. So, Andrew, you were talking about empirical data. let's actually look at that data, right? Let's look at some of the most expensive Olympics over the years. And all our research points to the fact that it dates right back to 1976, right, during the Montreal Olympics.

This was actually the first time we saw that kind of largesse on that scale, right? The actual cost of the Olympics overshot the projected cost of $124 million by several billion dollars. Then, of course, there was the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi that cost some 50s, $50 billion. You had the 2016 summer games in Rio, which cost around $20 billion. You had the 22 winter games in Beijing. These were reported to have cost $39 billion. We also have some data on Tokyo.

Give me a second to pull that up as well. Yeah. So, for instance, Japan, you know, it budgeted for about $7.4 billion and ended up spending about $15.4 billion, right? It's huge. These are huge amounts of money that we're talking about. Very often taxpayers' money. So given that fact, you know, the massive difference between the actual budget and the actual amount being spent,

why would a country want to host the Olympics, especially a developing country? Okay, let me first just clarify one thing about the cost of the Olympics. You cited, for example, $15.4 billion being the cost of Tokyo. The actual cost of the Tokyo Olympics was closer to $30 billion. What you find habitually is that the numbers that get reported, refer to what's called the operating budget, which primarily are the costs for running the games for 17 days and do not include much of the infrastructure. So the actual costs are usually considerably higher. The Paris Games, for instance, it's being reported to cost $9.7 billion.

That doesn't include extending the metro out to San Deney. It doesn't include the $1.5 billion they spent to try to clean up the Sen River. It doesn't include a bunch of other things. So keep that in mind, as I answer this question about why would a city want to do it? Well, I think, first of all, think of the politicians who support it. The politicians get a tremendous amount of exposure in their city, in their country, and around the world. They get also to shake hands with world's leaders who come to the Olympic Games. There's a lot of publicity. Most politicians are very concerned about the trajectory of their careers, and they see this as an opportunity to expand and enhance that trajectory. Another factor that's very important is that when you host the Olympics,

there are going to be billions and billions of dollars of construction contracts handed out. Construction companies and developers and the unions who work, the workers who work for those construction companies, they themselves stand to benefit from hosting the games. There's a lot of money that will benefit private interests from hosting the games. That's a different matter than benefiting the public treasury or benefiting the public interests. So there are political forces that push this forward thinking about their own self-interest. I think that's another major reason why it happens. A third reason it happens is because the IOC has a tremendous amount of research. sources, they have a long history, and they have a very well-oiled and effective propaganda machine

that puts out a lot of these myths about the good things that could happen to a host city. So I think that's what's been pushing it. But keep in mind also that the number of cities that are willing to host the Olympic Games has been going down and down and down. In fact, let me point out two things. When the 2024 games were awarded to Paris back in 2017, the IOC was worth. that if they had another bidding for the 2028 games, that nobody would bid. Los Angeles had already said to the IOC back in 2017 that if they didn't get the games in 2024, they weren't going

to bid again. And we know that three European cities backed out of bidding for the 2024 games. So there was a lot of concern by the IOC that no countries were interested anymore in hosting the games or would be interested. And so another thing that the IOC did in 2009, is they changed their bidding process. Up until 2019, they called for a competitive open bid that would be publicized internationally. In 2019, they changed that to having private behind the doors, behind closed curtains bidding. And so now if a city decides not to host or if a city decides not to bid to host, it doesn't become revealed. There's no embarrassment or no explicit embarrassment. to the IOC there. So fewer and fewer cities are willing to indulge in this extravagance.

Andrew, could you briefly explain to us how the process of bidding actually works? Because you've written about it extensively, about how the problem actually begins here. What do you mean when you say that? And also, is the process of bidding different for a developed country versus a developing country? So the historical bidding process is that seven years before the Olympic Games are going to happen, the IOC selects the next country to host or the next city to host the Olympics. Leading up to that decision seven years ahead of time is a lot of jockeying, at least historically, cities around the world would compete against each other for a period of two or three years

before the IOC finally made its decision. One of the things that would happen is the cities would send delegations to Zurich, where presentations were, excuse me, not to Lozern, to make presentations to the IOC about why their city was better equipped to host the games than any other city. So it was an open process, and there was an open competition amongst the world cities. That doesn't happen anymore. It's all behind closed doors. Now, the other question you're asking is, how is the bidding process different for developed countries or developed cities and less developed cities?

It's basically the same process. But keep in mind that historically, a city would spend anywhere from $60 to $200 million just to bid to host a games. And that amount of money, of course, was always more difficult to come by for lesser developed cities. But, you know, when you say that, you know, a country would qualify post-the-bidding process, does it essentially go to the country that's willing to spend the most amount of money on the Olympics? So the bidding was never a bidding in dollars. But what it was was a country would or a city would say, we're going to build a new Olympic Stadium, we're going to build a new Velodrome,

we're going to build a new aquatic center, we're going to build a new airport, we're going to build new transportation routes to connect these various venues. And that plan that included all of the infrastructure, sporting and transportation and other infrastructure, that plan would have a certain price tag associated with it. So the cities would really be bidding by presenting their plan for hosting the games, how they were going to host the games. And that had an implied price. But they wouldn't bid. It wouldn't be city A saying, oh, we'll bid $12 billion. And then another city saying we'll bid $12.5 billion.

dollars. So, so Andrew actually while we're on the subject of infrastructure, you kind of hinted at this a little while ago, but I want to kind of unpack what you said there, right? You said that very often countries are willing to bid these huge amounts of money, but the ROI really isn't worth it, right? But when we talk about infrastructure, isn't infrastructure essentially a good thing, right? Like, for instance, if we look back in history, you have the case of Barcelona in 1992 when it hosted the Olympics. For our listeners who aren't familiar with what happened, Spain was really excited. because it finally had this big opportunity to show off to the world that it was a democracy now, right? This was after the fall of Franco's dictatorship.

It's pretty well documented, in fact, that the city of Barcelona was fully transformed for the Olympics. You saw about 15 different venues being built, which are literally still in use even today. A lot of the other infrastructure developed at the time is still in use today. It's become somewhat of an example for the rest of the world. Right? And then you have Paris, Tokyo, Beijing. You hear about rivers being cleaned up, public transport being expanded. Aren't those really, really good things to come out of the Olympics? Okay. Well, first of all, Barcelona is a unique case, and I've written about it, and I think that they have a case to make that it was actually beneficial to the city's development. And there are very special circumstances that surrounded the Barcelona hosting in 1992. We can talk about those special circumstances if you want. But I think that Barcelona stands alone in that regard. With regard to the question of whether or not when you have new transportation infrastructure

or you have new sporting infrastructure, doesn't that help the city going forward? And the answer is, sure, sometimes it does to some degree. But like, for instance, when Rio built a metro that went from Ipanema Beach in the downtown area down to a southern suburb 15 miles away called Baja Datijuka, that's, that. that metro is still there. It costs over $3 billion to build. The question is not whether there are some people who can now benefit from that metro, but if you're going to spend, if Rio was going to spend $3 billion on upgrading its metro transportation system, would that have been the kind of investment they would have made? And the answer is decidedly no. They would have had to make investment in the

downtown transportation network, not transportation going out to the suburbs. And so instead of spending $3 billion on a project that was very, very low priority, that could have spent that on a high priority project and gotten much more banged for the buck out of it. So, yes, when a country spends $10 billion or $20 or $30 billion or more on infrastructure, some of that will be valuable. But that doesn't mean it was a sensible investment to make from the standpoint of the city's economic development. Right. Another example, Andrew, that is often given is the 2008 Beijing Games, right?

And what it did for China, I mean, of course, it was the most expensive Summer Olympic Games in history. But because China apparently spent $50 billion on it. But after that, China's yearly economic output has more than tripled. And that actually continued until the pandemic and the slowdown that came with it. So do you think something similar could? happened in a country like India, considering how many parallels there are between India and China in terms of our economic trajectory? Well, I don't think that there's any direct evidence that says the reason why China had good

economic growth between 2008 and 2020 was because of hosting the Olympic Games. On the contrary, they spent $45 or $50 billion on hosting the games. they took in about $4 or $5 billion. That's a tremendous deficit. I mean, China was growing very, very rapidly before 2008. It was growing at over 10% a year. There have been econometric studies by academics, scholars, who weren't being paid by one side or the other to come out with a conclusion.

And what they have found over and over again is that hosting the games does not promote economic development. Now, I think, again, there are special cases like Barcelona. but those cases generally are not repeated. They're not experienced by other cities unless you can generate the special conditions that existed in Barcelona. Right. Andrew, what's funny is that, you know, it's been more than 100 years of the Olympics,

and ideally by now we should have been able to figure out how to host a sporting event of the scale without corruption in a fair and sustainable way, right? Do you think it's too idealistic to think of the Olympics being organized? organized or without any corruption? Well, the corruption historically began with the bidding process. Today you have about 100 members of the International Olympic Committee

who vote to award the games to a particular city. When the bidding for hosting was open, an open competition, the cities that wanted to get the right to host would very often bribe some of the people on the International Olympic. committee. They clean that up quite a bit after Salt Lake City got the winter games in 2002 because they identified some very rampant corruption going on. And I think that that mechanism for corruption is also reduced now with the closed bidding process, with the behind the closed doors bidding that happens. But there's still a tremendous opportunity and an inducement

for corruption because when you, again, when you host the games and as the organizing committee for the games, you're handing out billions and billions of dollars of contracts to construction companies. The construction companies obviously have an incentive to influence behind closed doors who gets the contracts. And they can do that by supporting the causes of the particular members of the organizing committee, or they can do that by giving the members of the organizing committee special benefits and perquisites. So all of the recent games have had at least some corruption, and sometimes that corruption, of course, gets completely out of control. Right. Andrew, you spoke about how very few cities are now bidding to host the Olympics. Right. And it makes sense when you're looking

at the expense involved, you're looking at all the corruption involved, all of that put together just really points to the fact that the IOC has a lot of introspecting to do, right, to kind of get its act together. What do you think the IOC needs to do to kind of incentivize cities to take hosting the Olympics seriously again? I think there's one rational solution that we should work towards, and that is that the same city should host the games every four years. When the modern Olympics began in 1896, we didn't have international telecommunications, who didn't have international jet travel.

And in order to engage the rest of the world, the whole world, in watching the Olympics and participating in the Olympics, and enjoying the Olympics, in spreading the symbolism of the Olympics, you needed to move the Olympics around from city to city. You don't need to do that anymore. And what we know based upon lots and lots of scholarship over the last 20 or 30 years is that it's not a benefit economically and socially

for a country or a city to host. the Olympics. And therefore, this notion that we should spread it around and give everybody a chance to host because it's so good for your country, that's not true. We haven't found that to be the case. We found the opposite to be the case, if anything. So there's really no reason to move the games from one city to another every four years and rebuild the entire Olympic infrastructure that is required. We can find one city to host time after time, not waste the resources and not create all of the disorganization and waste and potential for corruption that currently exists. What city do you think would be best equipped if the IOC actually were to consider that as an

option as an alternative, if they were to think of that, what city do you think would be the best suited to hold the Olympics at? Well, right now, if we had to make one choice for the Summer Olympics, it would be Los Angeles. But I don't know if the people of Los Angeles would want to host the games every four years, as I said before. It's a tremendous amount of corruption. Casey Wasserman, who's the head of the organizing committee for Los Angeles 28, has likened or analogized the hosting of the Olympic Games to hosting a football Super Bowl seven times a day for 17 consecutive days. It's an enormously complex and disruptive activity. And the other thing that's true is even though I think Los Angeles is likely to break even or do better

than break even in 2028, they're going to depend upon a lot of support from the U.S. government, part of it in infrastructure and part of it in security. The security bill might be $2 billion or more. So the U.S. government would then be on the hook also for supporting it. But if it weren't Los Angeles or it weren't some other existing city, I think there's a viable plan out there to choose a plot of land, maybe 1,000 acres of land, somewhere between Olympia, Greece and Athens, and build the Olympic infrastructure there. I use that every four years. When the Olympics is not happening, use it for smaller competitions,

use it as a training facility for the world's athletes. That would make a lot of sense as well. So to make the Olympics about sports again and not about diplomacy and politics, because it's turned into like this big political event, right? So to kind of take that focus away from diplomacy and bring it back to like sports or sporting event, an international sporting event,

Exactly right. Exactly right. The Olympics is a sporting event. The IOC has tried to turn it into a political event, an event about prestige, an event about competition amongst political entities. That makes little sense economically, little sense environmentally. Let's remember that this is a sporting competition and let's focus on that element. Andrew, you know, another alternative that a lot of economists have been suggesting, apart from yours, and which is actually very completely opposite to what you just said, is spreading the Olympics out to different cities in different countries for different events, right? They say that it is a great way of cutting costs because more people will be spending on events and it would mean a smaller bill for each city, like a multi-city model. What do you think of this idea? Well, I think that you're throwing out one of the wonderful things about the Olympics when you do that.

It seems to me that the glory of the Olympics and the wonderful symbolism of the Olympics is to bring the 11,000 athletes from 205 countries around the world, bring them all together, have them live in one Olympic village for two and a half weeks, have them consort together, have them play together, have them exercise together, show us that the people of the world that they can, love each other and enjoy each other and play together, put them all in the same place. That's, to me, one of the greatest things about the Olympic Games. And if you start saying, okay, we'll put this sport in India and we'll put that sport in New Zealand, we'll put the other sport in Chile, and you start doing it that way, then you've thrown out the integrating aspect of the Olympics that I think is at its essence, at its core essence. So I'm not in favor of that. I think it also portends a lot more transportation expense and carbon footprint, if you do it that way. And, and, you know, basically we already have that. We already have, there are several dozen world sport federations, and each sports federation already has its own competitions within countries and internationally, periodically. And so we already have that. And so we're going to sort of saying, let's take what we already have. And instead of calling what we call it, now we'll call it the Olympics going forward. So I think that's really the wrong

approach. Right. And you just one last question that I have, you know, apart from changing the bidding process, which now sounds like it's gotten worse because it's become more opaque, it's not transparent at all, are there any solid efforts to bring about reforms that the IOC has been doing? They have, because the IOC realized Thomas Spock, the head of the IOS, he realized back around 2012, 2013 when he came into office, that countries and cities weren't interested in bidding anymore. And so he realized they had to make it simpler and less expensive. And so they did introduce some reforms that make it easier to host, make it cheaper to bid, introduce more flexibility, encourage cities to use existing facilities rather than build new

facilities. So they've made some changes. Those changes in the case of Tokyo, 2020, 2021 probably saved Tokyo $1 or $2 billion. But when you're talking about an expense of $30 billion and a revenue of $5 billion to save $1 or $2 billion is helpful, but it hardly addresses the depth of the actual problem. So I think that they have made some positive and constructive steps in the right direction, but they haven't gone nearly far enough. 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 our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters, and podcast extras.

Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by Rahil Filippos and I, Sinkda Sharma, and it was edited by Rajiv Sien. Also a huge shout-out to Aditi and Kavipriya and the rest of our fantastic design team here at the Ken for the amazing artwork that they make for every Friday special episode of Daybreak.