The 2026 Manifesto: Think, Read, Write—Or Get Left Behind

I was one among hundreds of thousands in a mass of white and black across Masjid Al Haram on a warm January night in Makkah. The atmosphere electrified with the hum of Dhikr or the hushed whispers of Dua—a million voices echoing across the pillars of the largest mosque in the world.

I hear echoes of security guards yelling “Haaji!”, get tossed around by pilgrims eager to touch the Kaaba, and walk through hundreds of people from around the world whose language I didn't understand but were ever so eager to offer me dates or snacks. 

Outside the perimeter of the massive praying complex, you will always find a long queue flooding towards Al Baik, a fast food restaurant that's the Saudi equivalent to KFC. In the book The Barakah Effect: More With Less, author Mohammad Faris writes: "When Shakour Abu Ghazalah opened [Al Baik], he set one simple rule: for every fried chicken he sells, he'll donate one riyal to charity." 

Muslims are often encouraged to do Sadaqah Jariyah (ongoing charity). My late mother reminded my brothers and me how this act will help us get better Barakah (divine blessing). As Muslims, whenever you think of Barakah, you often end up thinking about your own legacy, about what you leave behind after your passing. When you are in Makkah among a million other pilgrims, you think about such things: from your relationship with Allah to your relationship with your kith and kin, and what you’d want to be remembered for when you pass away.

With a gazillion thoughts storming my mind, I was also thinking about my skills as a writer. I’m looking to leave a body of work that will outlast me, and hopefully stay relevant as long as the Internet exists. This ambition has led me to sharpen what my newsletter is about:

Here’s the problem that I am looking to address: 

We all know what brain rot has done to us. The internet has made us foolish and hate each other. Stats say we’ll spend a major chunk of our lives looking at screens. It’s common now to have our feed flooded with fake news or genocide clips. It is super-duper hard to do any offline task because there's always a phone notification ready to yank away our attention.

Now, thanks to AI slop, we don't know what is real or what is synthetic. While it is easy to produce content, be it a video, a text, or an audio with just a few prompts, what AI can never do is replicate our lived experience as a human being: AI has never walked in our home, nor has it felt how we felt when we read a new book, watched a movie, or chatted with our family and friends whose memories still live in our mind rent-free.

Thankfully, this is the best part of AI – it can never be human. But for us to be better humans, writing and reading is perhaps the most important thing to do.

To write as a human, you need to think better. And to think better, you need to read deeply—not AI summaries or apps that allow you to digest content like quick pills. Reading is powerful. You read to make sense of something complex, or to escape because the world is incredibly bizarre. So why should we let AI cut down things for us?

Writing is probably the most intimate act that lets you think clearly and to dump the words that float around our brain. Maybe some idea that popped when we were listening to a podcast, watching a reel, chatting with friends, flipping through a random book. Those offline experiences which feel so deep and humane… maybe we want to capture them by writing it down and possibly make sense of it.

That's where frameworks come in. Frameworks are anchors, a guideline, a style of thinking about how we approach to do something to get better outcomes. Think of it as a north star to direct our ship of thoughts to reach the shores of optimism. Thus, I strongly believe the best frameworks that we can adopt in this hopeless world is speculative journalism and speculative fiction. Here's why:

Together, these frameworks work hand-in-hand. Speculative journalism lets you imagine what the future can be while speculative fiction allows you to briefly live in this future through pages. 

Ryan Holiday says in The Perennial Seller that any form of writing has to either entertain or transform. I aim to do both.

The Fiction Emailer explores deep-dive essays that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. I'll show you how you can use these core aspects to tap opportunities at work and earn money as a better communicator. 

I’ve done this myself over the past seven years of my career from working at the smallest of newsrooms (News Today, Talk Media, DT Next) to national dailies (The Hindu) to working at leading private institute (Ashoka University) to working as a ghostwriter for accomplished entrepreneurs with decades of experience.

Of course, I still have a lot to learn. Thus, my newsletter will also include interviews with journalist creators, fiction authors, non-fiction writers, scientists, academics, and entrepreneurs. I’m eager to ask them three vital questions: 

I'm joining a movement of creative individuals taking imaginative stories on a global scale from ‘MAYA’ by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon, Vaibhav Chavan's ‘Mukti’ to writers like Peter Gould and Rehan Khan building ‘Tales of Khayaal’. There are other comparative publication examples too such as Every.to, Asimov Press, The Science of Fiction, Locus Magazine, Transfer Orbit, World Builders, and works of Nicolas Cole & Dickie Bush. 

My newsletter isn't for everyone but it is certainly for someone. 

I’d describe someone as follows: 

And finally, if you are looking at writing as a source not just to grow financially or professionally but personally too, then you’re home. 

Because in a world where everyone can artificially create anything, the people who win are the ones who think the long-term game with skills that outlasts AI with virtues that foster impact, value and legacy. 

I’m super excited to get things started. Stay tuned!