Akkiblogpost

Six weeks into seeing Karan, Riya had a long list of reasons to like him. He replied to her messages on time. He remembered her mother's name. He once drove across the city just to return a charger she had left at his place. Then one Saturday, the pizza arrived at their table, and he clapped. Just a quick, delighted clap, the kind a child makes. Something in Riya's stomach turned over. Nothing about Karan had changed. He was exactly the same person who had been kind to her for six weeks. But for the rest of the evening she could not stop noticing him, and by the time she got home she knew something had shifted that she could not simply undo. She also felt guilty about it, because what kind of person goes off someone over a clap? This is an illustrative example, but if it sounds uncomfortably familiar, you have met what the internet calls the ick, and a 2025 study has finally given it some proper scientific attention. What the Ick Actually Is The ick is Gen Z slang fo...

Somewhere in your extended family, there is probably a court case that nobody talks about anymore because it has been running for so long. A land dispute that started when your grandfather was alive. A cheque bounce matter that was filed before smartphones became common. A family partition case where half the original parties have passed away and their children now attend the hearings instead. Everyone knows the dates keep getting pushed, and nobody quite remembers when it started feeling normal. That feeling of normal is worth pausing on, because it reflects a number that is genuinely hard to picture. In July 2026, the Law Minister told Parliament that roughly 5.64 crore cases were waiting to be decided in Indian courts , a figure drawn from the National Judicial Data Grid, the government's own live count. And now, a new question is being asked with real seriousness: can artificial intelligence actually help clear a pile this large, or does it just add a new kind of risk to...

You buy a chai for ₹17. The app rounds it up to ₹20 and quietly tucks away the remaining ₹3 into digital gold. You pay an auto fare of ₹82, and ₹8 disappears into the same growing little pile. None of it feels like saving in any way your parents would recognise. There's no monthly SIP form, no fixed deposit receipt, no conscious moment where you decided to set money aside. It just happens, in the background, every single time you pay for anything at all. This is the entire premise behind a genuinely new category of Indian fintech apps, and it has quietly become one of the more significant shifts in how young Indians are building their first investing habit, even if the amounts involved look almost comically small on their own. How the Mechanics Actually Work The leading app in this space, Jar, links directly to a user's UPI transactions and rounds each payment up to the nearest ₹10, automatically investing the spare change into 24K digital gold. A ₹27 purchase sends ...

There is a new kind of problem quietly changing the way companies think about online hiring in India. A candidate applies for a technical role, clears the screening, performs exceptionally well in a video interview, answers difficult questions confidently, and appears to have exactly the experience the company is looking for. The company makes an offer. Then the person actually joining the team turns out to be very different from the person who impressed everyone during the interview. Sometimes the explanation is not an exaggerated experience or a bad résumé. Someone else took the interview. This is known as a proxy interview . The actual candidate hires or arranges for another person with stronger technical skills to appear in their place during an interview or assessment. The problem existed before remote hiring, but online recruitment has made impersonation much easier to attempt at scale. In India, the issue became particularly visible in 2026 when Infosys deferred online assessmen...

Open your bank statement right now and actually read every line for the last thirty days, rather than skimming it the way you normally would. Somewhere in there is probably a cloud storage plan you upgraded two years ago for a project that's long finished. A meditation app you downloaded during a stressful week in 2024 and never opened again. A second OTT platform your family signed up for during one specific show's finale and simply never cancelled. None of these charges are large enough on their own to trigger alarm. Together, they are quietly one of the most common, least noticed leaks in a modern Indian household's monthly budget. This isn't really about any one forgotten app. It's about what happens when an entire generation of services, built specifically to auto-renew without requiring a single active decision, meets a payment system, UPI autopay and saved cards, that was built specifically to remove every bit of friction from paying for things. The re...