I finished writing a 50,000-word book about the Indian economy this weekend. It was an exhausting two-and-a-half weeks, where I woke up early and started researching and writing and rewriting. It was eye-opening. I was: impressed by how the Internet has changed one's interaction with the government; more suspicious of economists than before; frustrated that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, despite the advantages of the 2014 mandate, squandered the opportunity to put the economy on a double-digit growth path; and baffled that one of our worst finance ministers, Arun Jaitley, is back in the saddle.

I enjoy writing. When you've got the flow, then a universe opens out to you. You give the world inside a book its structure. You have many words to choose from, and your mood or your innate nastiness can calibrate which you will choose. While I worked on this book, a prominent Mumbai media personality contacted me to write a piece for his book, a collection about 25 eminent Indian achievers. I devoted five-six days to that piece, about my old friend, the former spy chief, and then returned to the economy. That break to work on a completely different kind of piece refreshed my thinking and gave me new ideas to incorporate in the book. The creative process has no formula, but it undoubtedly beats life in an office.