Hello and welcome to another edition of Weekly Wine.
It’s been a bit of a chaotic week, thanks to the World Cup, which is throwing off our circadian rhythms. The good thing is that we have something to write about that is not as furious as politics. On the other hand, the World Cup is being held amid the most politically turbulent time since World War II, in the most politically divided country, with the most politically divisive president ever. Okay, enough ranting.
In this week’s edition, we look at Kunal Shah’s meteoric rise and explain the Cred business model, examine why so many smart Indians have fallen for Jeff Bezos’s fake quote on the water, explain how Sir Alex Ferguson’s old lieutenant stopped England in its tracks, and ask why, sometimes, one’s therapist is unreachable.
CRED model
It is fitting that the person who has been chosen to lead WhatsApp globally is not some IIT-IIM techie but a gentleman who studied philosophy at Wilson College, Mumbai, and left the MBA course, which already makes him smarter than most IIT-IIM graduates.
The tech world was stunned when Meta chose Kunal Shah to lead WhatsApp globally. Then came the inevitable question, as Camus was contemplating suicide: What exactly is CRED’s business model? Is it selling 90s nostalgia to the millennial generation? Inspiring childhood heroes to break character? To those who understand Marx better than Maiman, this model may seem strange.
CRED starts by gathering India’s most valuable credit-card users: people with credit scores above 750. This gives it a rare moat, the kind of product managers dream about in their sleep: a financially disciplined, urban, high-spending base that is useful to banks, card companies and premium brands. In plain English, this group means the epitome of the upper middle class that doesn’t want to earn their money through criminal endeavours.
CRED then turns bill payment into a monthly habit. Coins, perks, and access to premium brands turn a boring job into something slightly rewarding. But the rewards are just the hook. Once CRED has an audience and habituation, it can make money through CRED Pay transactions, lending, CRED Mint and brand partnerships.
So no, CRED doesn’t just have the data. It has filtered audiences, repeat behaviour, trust, and monetisation rails. The bet is simple: a small group of wealthy, trusted users can be more valuable than a much larger crowd that came for cashback and disappeared before the invoice was paid.
Jeff Bezos and water
In 1996, Alan Sokal entered academia with a whoopee cushion in one hand and a flamethrower in the other. The NYU physicist deliberately wrote an absurd paper, filled it with fashionable jargon, decorated it with the political flavour of the time, and sent it off as a social lesson to a cultural studies magazine that considered itself intelligent. The magazine published it, after which Sokal revealed that the whole thing was a hoax.
This lesson was cruel because it made people uncomfortable. Wise people can swallow the garbage by wearing the garment of their faith when it comes to it.
Nearly three decades later, the Internet has transformed the SoCal Affair into a daily production model. A hoax no longer requires a journal, a submission process, or a title that sounds like a rejected Radiohead album. All it needs is a billionaire’s face, an AI panic, a climate worrier, and the word “breaking” over the top like a cheap police siren.
Which brings us to Jeff Bezos and the quote he never said.
In the viral claim, Bezos argued that water for AI data centres should be prioritised over human consumption. Some versions gave him this line: “Humans will not evolve humanity. AI will.” Another turned the same idea into polished apocalypse – talking about biological limits, infinite digital potential and the threat of a data infrastructure starved of cooling resources to preserve basic human comfort.
It sounded less like a tech conference quote and more like a Bond villain monologue written by someone who had just discovered LinkedIn.
Critical reporting of Bezos’ VivaTech appearance focused on AI, labour shortages, his venture Prometheus, Blue Origin, the Moon, and the familiar billionaire’s dream of moving polluting industries off Earth. There’s enough to examine, question, and poke fun at that servers can dream up without having to coin a line about leaving humans thirsty.
The fake travelled because it had everything a modern liar needed. Bezos is already a full-fledged cultural character: the Amazon warehouse, the rockets, the private space dreams, the unimaginable wealth and the billionaire’s habit of discussing humanity as if it were an underperforming business unit. The purpose of the claim was not to create a villain; the villain had already been selected.
Then came water, turning a policy question into a fundamental fear. Electricity seems technical, but water is intimate. We drink it, store it in summer, fight for it in drought, and remember its importance only when air comes out of the tap. Once water enters the story, Aakrosh doesn’t need much help.
AI’s resource footprint gave lies its runway. Data centres raise real questions about cooling, power, water use, local tensions, and corporate privacy, but online conversations about AI and water have already become a quagmire of bad arithmetic. People confuse annual data centre consumption with per-query usage. The chilled water mixes with the water used indirectly through power generation. Litres per year, litres per prompt and litres per image are thrown into the same bucket, after which someone throws the bucket down the timeline.
Once the denominator disappears, each number becomes a weapon.
That’s why Bezos’ quote worked. It asked people to confirm what they already feared: AI is thirsty, Big Tech is secret, billionaires are ruthless and ordinary people will be asked to subsidise the future built above their heads.
The most dangerous sentence online is, “I can imagine him saying that.” Once a claim reaches that point, evidence becomes paperwork, and the fact-checker begins to struggle. Worse, fakery helps the person it wants to attack because it allows the powerful to deny the most absurd accusation and avoid tough questions.
The water footprint of AI deserves investigation. Data centre deals are worth investigating. Billionaire techno-utopianism deserves scrutiny. That test requires numbers that remain in contact with the calculator.
Sokal showed that nonsense can fool smart people when it levels the room. Bezos’ quote shows that even smart people can be foolish.
fake general
Before he was causing a Fergie-like reaction in international football, Queiroz was the man who helped create Ferguson’s third great Manchester United team. Ferguson was a great admirer, calling him the assistant who challenged him intellectually and “the closest you can get to being manager of Manchester United without actually holding the title.”
Under Queiroz, United moved away from their flamboyant 4–4–2 style with two wingers and two central midfielders towards a more flexible 4–3–3, which gave them greater balance in midfield, more fluid forwards and a counter-attacking formation that could also defend. It was this figure who helped transform United into a more serious European power.
One match that stood out was Manchester United’s Champions League semi-final victory over Barcelona in 2008, which was decided by a classic Paul Scholes goal and a defensive masterclass in two phases in which Barcelona dominated possession and still lost. One wonders whether United’s two encounters with Barcelona in the 2009 and 2011 finals would have been slightly different had Queiroz still been there.
He was also instrumental in signing players from Portugal and Brazil, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Nani and Anderson, and helped transform Ronaldo from a touchy-feely teenager into an athletic specimen who became the complete footballer whose rivalry with Lionel Messi dominated football for almost two decades.
Like his compatriot and former student José Mourinho, Carlos Queiroz’s first goal is not to lose, a strategy dubbed “sufferball”, in which both teams suffer a loss but only one does so willingly. Against England, Queiroz had a clear structure: a disciplined mid-block, a narrow back line, and Thomas Partey screening the defence, while England kept wide possession but did not become a serious goal threat. Ghana had no desire to win the high ball against the England centre-backs. Instead, he protected the middle, pressing England’s attack-minded midfielders and preventing Harry Kane from dropping into the pocket and combining. As DAZN’s analysis noted, England had “width without penetration.”
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Postscript by Prasad Sanyal
My therapist says she can’t contact me. This is not because he lacks skills or abilities. On the contrary, she is intelligent, patient, observant and possesses the kind of calm that would make an air traffic controller mildly excited.
The problem is that every time she tries to talk to the hurt person, they send the furious person off to join the meeting. Anger, unlike hurt, comes prepared.
There are points of discussion in anger.
Rage has supporting documents.
Rage has the screenshots.
Rage has a 47-slide presentation called “Why Everything Is Terrible and Why I’m Right About It.”
Meanwhile, my therapist laid me down on a couch away from her. This is an ancient idea. Freud preferred that patients not look directly at the analyst. The theory, as I understand it, was that people speak more freely when they’re not busy managing another person’s reactions. No encouraging nods or sympathetic smiles, no direct judgement – just you and your thoughts. I’m beginning to suspect that this system was invented specifically for people like me.
