Dharmesh Ba
@dharmeshba

Tech • Design • Ethnography Weekly Indian consumer insights - The India Notes 🇮🇳 (19,000+ subs) 👇

 Bangalore, India
newsletter.theindianotes.com…
Joined November 2011
2,580 Photos and videos
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The Action Economy: A Thesis for Building Foundational AI in India

Vijaya Mahadevan is in her early 50s, a digital marketing educator with a small Tamil Instagram following, and a habit of explaining technology through the life it actually touches. When she explains

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Never ending checklist!

Last week I stumbled upon a Tamil film called Paranthu Po - “Fly Away.” The setup is painfully ordinary. A middle-class couple in the city, punching above their weight to give their son the best life

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Everyone's Building. Nobody's Asking For Whom?

Ever since OpenClaw launched, my tech founder groups have sounded like a maternity ward. “My bot cleaned up my repo today.” “My AI agent replies to all my messages now.” “I deployed a bot that makes

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Confessions of a Claudaholic!

The best time to learn coding was 10 years ago and the second best time was never. I say this as someone who burnt his hands multiple times trying to learn frontend. Design and code need two different

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Baahubali Didn't Create Pan-India Cinema. A YouTube Channel Did!

Most people think Baahubali made North India fall in love with South Indian cinema. They’re wrong. I’m one of those people who watch more filmmaker interviews on YouTube than the films themselves. If

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Notes on conducting consumer research

Notes from the session 'Consumer Insights & Product Research' on 10th Jan 2026 Remote vs In Person Remote research is effective, but in-person is superior for cohorts with low tech literacy like

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WhatsApp owns India!

India’s most used business software isn’t chosen - it’s tolerated. Over the past 18 months, I poured lakhs of rupees and time into building automation tools on top of WhatsApp - and failed. That

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What Indian Consumers Want in 2026?

A friend of mine had a brutal stretch few years back. Moving countries, a new job, and losing his father and grandmother - all while trying to hold it together. He’s one of the few people I can talk

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Insights from building games for India

This post was orginally published on my Substack - The India Notes. Outside the newsletter, I run 1990 Research Labs - where I help global tech companies and Indian market leaders make sense of
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Why India needs its own Eleven Labs?

There is a fundamental difference in how Indians express emotions compared to the West. In certain Tamil communities, grief isn't a private affair. It's a communal healing performed through a ritual

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