Daybreak

This episode revisits one of The Ken's most consequential stories from 2025.

When journalist Anand Kalyanaramn started investigating unusual patterns in India's options market, he uncovered alleged manipulation on a massive scale. Someone was controlling market movements to guarantee profits—making billions while regular traders lost everything. SEBI identified Jane Street as the culprit; and the firm is appealing the allegation.

Today, Anand explains how the alleged scheme worked, why India was vulnerable, and what this landmark case means for the future of fair markets.

*The host mistakenly says that SEBI began investigating Jane Street in 2025. While the interim order was issued in July 2025, the investigation itself began in 2024.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Teaching at India’s public universities no longer offers the certainty it once did. Permanent jobs have become scarce, while short term contracts have quietly filled the gap. Many teachers are now hired semester by semester, paid per lecture, and required to reapply for their jobs again and again.

This shift has reshaped academic careers and changed how universities function day to day.

What caused this shift? And what does it say about the future of higher education and university teaching as a career choice?

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Property prices across Indian cities have gone through the roof, up by nearly 30% in the last two years. This along with ever increasing rent and general cost of living has made planning for the future quite challenging for those in their 20s and 30s. 

So has the idea of home ownership changed among the younger generations, like in many Western countries where more and more people are choosing to rent rather than buy?  Or are we still attached to the idea of owning a home?

And what’s behind these record-breaking property prices anyway?

Tune in to find out.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

This episode is a look back at four Daybreak, The Ken stories that stayed with us in 2025.

After three years of making the show, a few episodes each year stand out because they captured something shifting beneath the surface. These four did exactly that.

Host and producer Snigdha Sharma revisits a conversation feat. Waterfield Advisor's Soumya Rajan about why even India’s wealthiest women still fight for financial control, how China’s rare earth dominance exposed the fragility of India’s EV push, the global silver crunch that linked AI, clean energy, and everyday prices, and India's AI future.

Tune in. 

Private equity is reshaping India’s schools. A relaxed New Education Policy and rising demand for international curricula have opened the doors for global operators to buy up chains across the country.

The promise is scale, better infrastructure, and tighter governance. But the reality looks a little different—lean budgets, shrinking salary hikes, and a growing focus on cost-cutting. And the fallout? Increasing staff attrition, decreasing academic quality, and schools trading their founder-led ethos for a standardised model.

Tune in.

*Disclosure: The writer comes from a family that previously owned a school acquired partially by International Schools Partnership (ISP)

**This episode was originally published on September 16th 2025

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

AI is changing how people learn languages and India is where the shift is showing up first. Duolingo has scale here but very little conversion. At the same time AI tools now offer practice, feedback, and even conversation for free, while Indian platforms focus on jobs, exams, and real outcomes. 

In this episode, we look at how language learning is being reshaped in India, why translation is no longer the whole story, and what Duolingo is really defending. 

Tune in.

From the very public Ambani family feud to the private struggles of the Raymond family, the transfer of wealth and power has often been messy.

With over 850,000 millionaires in India, and many of them looking to transition their wealth in the next decade, there's a growing, yet largely unaddressed market for a specific type of expert: the succession coach.

Part mediator, part therapist, part strategist—they do more than just advise. They keep dynasties from tearing themselves apart.

Tune in.

*This episode was originally published on September 1st 2025.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In this episode, we bring you two reported stories from The Ken's newsroom that stayed with us this year.

The first, reported by Nuha Bubere, looks at Flipkart at a moment of pressure and at how its CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy is running the company as competition intensifies and expectations remain high.

In the second, Atul Krishna tells us about India’s decision to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in the country, and what that shift says about the state of higher education and public capacity.

You can find more of our best work from 2025 at the-ken.com.

Buried deep in Amazon's app is a partnership with Orange Health Labs for at-home diagnostics—it's third healthcare experiment in India after pharmacy and telemedicine.

The strategy? Target existing customers with zero advertising spend, keeping the bet low-risk while competitors like Bigbasket and Blinkit capture other categories.

With its U.S. healthcare playbook built on insurance infrastructure that doesn't exist in India, Amazon is playing a cautious waiting game. The question: is this genuine ambition or just a way to keep a foot in the door?

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Traditional case competitions are boring theater—companies toss out fake problems, students present cookie-cutter solutions nobody uses. The Ken flipped the script. It revealed something interesting: no company is safe anymore.

Students attacked more than a 100 incumbents—from McKinsey to temple economies—and built working prototypes showing exactly how they'd do it. The insight? AI hasn't just lowered the cost of building to near-zero; it's fundamentally changed who can be a disruptor.

Even established companies know this. Some volunteered as targets, desperate to understand how the next generation thinks.
When anyone can build anything, disruption isn't a question of if—it's already happening.

Check out the solutions here: https://the-ken.com/case-competition-2025/submissions/

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.