A few weeks ago, I was in a coffee shop, catching up with an old friend. It was one of those moments when life feels paused. The aroma of coffee and the low hum of conversations hung in the air.

My friend, ever buoyant, declared with dramatic flair, “I’m so happy you’ve embraced entrepreneurship!”

I said nothing. Not because I disagreed, but because I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t done, though. With a sly smile, she added, “At least you’ve jumped off the corporate salary bandwagon.”

I stirred my black coffee. It didn’t need stirring. In my head, I weighed her words. Should I tell her the truth? That entrepreneurship isn’t all glamour. It’s fulfilling, yes, but relentless.

Before I could decide, she dropped the next bombshell. “Someday, you’ll be a millionaire. Or even a billionaire!”

I almost choked. “Excuse me?”

The table next to us went silent. Two young men, mid-presentation, froze. Their audience, a man who looked like he made important decisions daily, turned to look at me too. The room suddenly felt charged.

I shuffled in my seat and mumbled something about the weather.

The moment passed. The other table wrapped up. The young men collected their notes. The polished man stood, slipping into his jacket.

He turned to the presenters. His voice was calm but sharp. “A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is roughly 32 years. There’s a big difference between a million and a billion.”

He glanced at them, then at my friend, and finally at me.

And then he walked away.

I turned to my friend. “There’s a lesson there,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose. “And what’s that?”

I smiled. “A million and a billion are one letter apart—with a lifetime in between.”

Three or four Fridays ago, I was taking a stroll. It had been a tough day, and the retreating monsoon had left its mark in the morning. As usual, I was out unwinding, trying to move on from the dreadful day’s leftover froth. That’s when a styrofoam cup, freshly emptied of its coffee, but not fully of its froth, landed an inch from my feet. I looked up, but amidst the maze of dull and dead windows in the apartment building, it seemed ghosts had just had their strong coffee. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The only thing moving was up in the sky: a big plane, its underside letting go of a bold golden scream: ‘Emirates’.

For a moment, I wondered—could the cup have come from the plane? My mind quickly jumped to The Gods Must Be Crazy, a film I watched as a kid. A film that left its mark. In the film, a simple Coca-Cola bottle thrown from a plane brings chaos to a peaceful tribe. It was funny, absurd, and deeply thought-provoking.

But as I stared at that cup and thought about the plane above, another question popped into my head—the kind of question that drags me down a rabbit hole, as though my brain were a carrot offered to a waiting rabbit.

What if the cup didn’t come from the plane? What if it came from space?

Falling Debris—Not Just a Styrofoam Cup

Once home, I found myself reading about Alejandro Otero in Florida. Something had crashed into his home—not a styrofoam cup, but a chunk of metal alloy weighing 1.6 pounds, falling from space. No, it wasn’t an alien invasion—it was space debris. Till recently, it was part of the International Space Station.

NASA’s response? “The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024. However, a piece of hardware survived and impacted a home in Naples, Florida.” Roughly translated: Oops.

In the next hour of scrolling, I found that NASA isn’t the only space cowboy littering stuff up there. SpaceX debris once flattened an animal enclosure in Indonesia. Fortunately, no animals were present. Or take the case of the 20-tonne Chinese Long March 5B rocket, which hurtled from Los Angeles to New York in under nine minutes. Eventually, it broke apart, and pieces fell into a village in the Ivory Coast. Well, God is kind.

The Sky Is (Literally) Falling

As I jumped from one URL to another, it became clear that these incidents aren’t isolated. Space debris is piling up. The European Space Agency estimates there are 36,500 pieces of debris larger than 10 cm orbiting Earth, with a total mass exceeding 11,500 metric tons. We’re talking about everything from paint flecks to dead satellites. The more we launch, the more junk we leave behind.

Then I read something that made me pause. Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer, warned that falling debris will eventually kill someone. A 2022 study predicts a 10% chance of casualties by 2032. Jah might not be Nostradamus, but the data suggests that his concern isn’t far-fetched.

What If It Hits an Aircraft?

And just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, another thought struck me: What if this random debris hit an aircraft? As is the way with the internet, it didn’t take long to find new material in that direction.

In 1996, a Boeing 757’s windscreen was cracked by an unidentified object at 31,500 feet. In 2013, another Boeing 757 had its nose-cone punctured by something unknown at 26,000 feet. Bird strikes were ruled out. Between voodoo and space debris, what do you think is the likelier cause?

As both air traffic and space junk increase, so do the risks. In November 2022, Spain and France even closed parts of their airspace because of a Chinese rocket body re-entering the atmosphere. Over 300 flights were disrupted.

What’s the Solution?

By now, I’d brewed some extra-strong espresso as there seemed to be no light at the end of this rabbit hole. What could be done?

One suggestion was to stop treating satellites as single-use. There’s precedent for this thinking. In the 1970s, the risk of oil spills led to calls for double hulls on tankers. The shipping industry resisted, but after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the US mandated double hulls. The world followed.

Today, space launches could be similarly regulated, with mandated disposal plans for satellites and rocket bodies. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for an airplane full of passengers to be struck by a rogue satellite’s unhinged door before these regulations take effect.

The European Space Agency has announced a Zero Debris Charter aimed at tackling the problem at its root. I read about it, yawning without realising.

Meanwhile, I’ve made a few decisions of my own.

Take my strolls with care—the folks in my apartment building haven’t signed any charters! If I’m the unlucky one on any given day, it’s my problem.

And live with gratitude. When I deal with dreary email and deadly calls, I’ve resolved to remind myself that at least it’s not as bad as a debilitating piece of alloy from outer space.

After reading the post on Independence Day, a good friend wrote a long text listing everything that was wrong with the country. It was easy to agree with all that is wrong. We disagreed on what needed to be done. And when we got to listing the ‘why’ of the state of affairs, our gulf only widened. The gulf kept widening and threatened to never stop. Until I brought up one specific point from Karthik Muralidharan’s superb book which I have been relishing.

Everything must be understood within its proper context. I didn’t quite see it this way until I read this book. This book rearranged stacks of thoughts in my mind.

” …in assessing Indian democracy, it is important to note that India is historically unique, by being a country that adopted democracy based on universal adult franchise from the outset—at a much lower level of per capita income and state capacity than most other modern democracies. India’s choice of ‘democracy before development’ has in turn created a unique set of political incentives and constraints.

….reason is India’s decision to adopt democracy based on universal adult franchise. Most countries became more democratic as they grew richer. India, however, started highly democratic and has stayed that way throughout its post-Independence history. This is a unique historic exception, a phenomenon that Arvind Subramanian has referred to as India’s ‘precocious democracy’

India’s choice of universal adult franchise democracy at the very outset is a great moral triumph. Despite being ‘democracies’, countries like the US and the UK excluded large fractions of their population from voting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with voting rights essentially restricted to land-owning white men.

Further, the wealth of these nations was built at least in part on the back of extreme exploitation of either slaves (in the US) or the colonies (in the case of the UK). This is why India’s democracy, which empowers even the most marginalized groups in society, is a signature achievement that we should all be proud of. Consistent with the global patterns discussed above, this democratic empowerment of the poor has created political incentives for welfare spending in India as well. However, this has taken place at a much earlier point in our development trajectory.

For example, the US launched food stamps for the poor in the 1930s at a GDP per capita of ~$20,000 (in 2011 dollars). In contrast, India launched the public distribution system (PDS) for food security for the poor in the 1960s at a GDP per capita of ~$1250, which is less than a tenth of the analogous US figure. Similarly, India introduced free midday meals in government schools at lower levels of income than most other countries. These are again laudable moral achievements, which were facilitated by India’s universal-franchise democracy.

At the same time, ‘democracy before development’ in India has created political pressure to expand the scope of the Indian state before building its strength to meet this expanded scope.20 This pressure, in turn, has made it more difficult to invest in building the capacity of the state to deliver against these goals by creating two fundamental challenges… “

The choices that we make have downstream consequences and realities. We forget to shine enough light on the choices themselves and the context in which those choices were made. When we lament the lack of development—or its absence altogether—we must also remember the credit side of the balance sheet.

To have forged a forward-thinking base for democracy in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds is quite something. Whichever side of the aisle you sit on, you have to acknowledge that.