“If you had to pick out of all these patterns and themes that we spoke about, which one are you the most sure about for the next season?

Two by Two is taking a short break before Season 3 starts in November, and for the season finale, the table gets flipped. Snigdha Sharma, who hosts Daybreak, The Ken’s daily news podcast, went back through both seasons of the show, pulled out the themes it keeps returning to, and put Praveen Gopal Krishnan in the guest's chair.

He discusses some of the themes India will see play out in the next couple of years, like how duopolies across quick-commerce, ride-sharing and food delivery will face pressures and continue to innovate to hold out. Or how legacy companies like HUL and Bajaj Finance tell us about our understanding of assets, and how that’ll play out. And of course, what exactly is the new urban Indian, and how will they continue to shape culture, cities and much more.

Two by Two will be on a short break, and will be back with Season 3 in November.

All of it leads back to a concept Praveen first wrote about six years ago in The Nutgraf: India’s California users, a group of roughly 10 million people whose habits shape the country's consumer tech, its startups and its culture.

In February of 44 BC, Mark Antony offered Julius Caesar a crown in front of a Roman crowd, and Caesar pushed it away. Antony offered it again; Caesar refused again. One more offer came from Anthony and Caesar refused it for the third time, yet again. Rome cheered.

Uber has been offered a way out of India three times in eight years. By SoftBank and Ola in 2018, by a phantom acquisition-merger with Ola in 2022, and by Rapido this May, and three times it has refused. Each time the objection was the same: Uber would not become a minority shareholder in a business someone else runs.

Praveen tells the eight-year story through two conversations recorded before the Rapido talks with Uber: Two by Two's own September 2025 interview with Prabhjeet Singh, then president of Uber India and South Asia, who explains the "number one or number two" doctrine, declines to disclose India's numbers, and describes a market where "a certain dollar amount has to be redistributed"; and Nikhil Kamath's August 2025 interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber explicitly acknowledged Rapido.

Uber calls India a must-win market.

The question we ask in this episode is what does Uber really want in India

References

Uber India has run the race and stayed the course. Can it change the game? : Episode 58, the full conversation with Prabhjeet Singh.

Uber, Ola, Rapido — the 3 wheels of India's post-Covid auto race

On 22 August, a hospital in Bengaluru hosted a “rave party” in its corridors, with kombucha and hospital props. Enough people were bemused and outraged. A week later, a "peptide party" was cancelled the day before it happened, after Karnataka's drug regulator asked what exactly was in the mocktails and later conducted raids. These are just a small flavour of the kind of strange, unusual events that are happening in the city. There are others : like invite-only house parties with AI-generated cocktails, people opening up their living rooms for strangers to come in and listen to music, running clubs, and people who make a habit of sitting in Cubbon Park reading different books, together, without speaking.

This summer, a new kind of Bangalorean has come to the forefront - they want to be around people, but never with people.

And brands have noticed.

This episode is about what happens when people who crave ambient belonging meet brands that are ready to push the envelope to find noise. The hyperindependent Bangalorean has moved here for a job, lives with flatmates they found on an app, is self-reliant to a fault, and is yet lonely in a very specific way. They will fill in a Google form to attend a party but won't accept an invitation to one. Then come the brands, who have discovered that fifty solitary attendees who are ready to experiment with something bizarre are worth more as a story than actually doing the work of crafting an event that’s worth their money and time.

Praveen puts this theory to two people who have spent years building events and curating spaces in Bengaluru.

Karthik Balakrishnan runs Underline Centre, a community space in Indiranagar that hosts a film club, improv, board games and origami meetups, and which he describes as "a daycare centre for adults".

Arpan Peter is the founder and CEO of Foreward Lifestyle and Experiences, a culture IP house behind the India Jazz Project and The Shift, a bar-culture platform whose ₹4,000 Secret Shift evenings sell out before anyone knows where they are.

Together, they try to answer the question of what happens when the hyperindependent Bangalorean walks into a hospital rave party.