The trees in the woods were laughing,
In the hills, the trees were laughing,
The water in the stream was laughing,
The water in the clouds was laughing,
The folks in the villages were laughing,
In the towns, the folks were laughing.
Each laughter reinforced the other,
And created sympathetic vibrations,
And the laughter crossed all realms,
And still the laughter kept on and on,
Till the laughter reached the heavens,
And woke up a petering light.
With the debate on 0.4% MDR reaching feverish pace, I reflected upon the royalty of the underlying architecture of QR code (upon which UPI payments are built).
The QR code was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave (a Toyota subsidiary). Denso Wave does hold patents on it, but made a deliberate decision early on not to exercise those rights against standard use of the technology — which is why QR codes could be freely embedded into UPI, Chinese mobile payments (Alipay/WeChat Pay), and thousands of other applications worldwide without licensing fees.
Imagine if Mr Hara (or, Denso Wave) would have charged a royalty of just 0.04% for QR code usage, how much would he have pocketed?
It is said that value of the UPI transactions per day is Ninety two thousand crore rupees. Given that here is a back of the envelope calculation:
Period Calculation Amount
Per day Rs 92,000 cr × 0.0004 Rs 36.8 crore/day
Per year Rs 36.8 cr × 365 ≈ Rs 13,432 crore/year
So on a single year's UPI flow alone, a 0.04% QR-usage royalty would generate roughly Rs 13,400+ crore (~$1.5 billion) — and that's just one year at one moment in UPI's growth curve. Applied cumulatively since UPI's 2016 launch (transaction value has grown from near-zero to ₹314 lakh crore annually), the number would run into tens of billions of dollars over the decade, since volumes were much lower in early years but compounding steadily.
Mr Hara left all that money on the table for the greater good of the community.
Compare this with what our government is planning to do. It has built the UPI system on top of QR encoding and now plans to encash on a system built on a free system. In my view, this is not ethically tenable. It is another matter that UPI payments were always touted as being made for the public good.
The above has an analogy with Creative Commons (CC) licence: CC BY-NC-SA version rules say that you can copy and modify, but no commercial use.
I say a similar rule must apply to UPI payments which is built on 'Creative Commons QR Code'.
What is your price of freedom?
Is it loneliness, or is it fear?
Or, is it vertigo?
Or, is it that you have
Nowhere to go?
Has the English letter 'z' found new favour in terms of usage due to use (or overuse) of the words "zoom" and "Gen Z"? Zoom usage includes the name of the app "Zoom" itself, of course. I got the data from Mark Davies, english-corpora.org.
With real NOW corpus numbers, this catches the pandemic spike. Here's the combined z-contribution from "zoom" + "Gen Z", year by year:
Source: NOW Corpus (Mark Davies, english-corpora.org), searched Sept 2026. Two y-axes are used because "zoom" and "Gen Z" occur at very different scales; each line's own axis lets both trends stay readable without switching to a log scale.
| Period | Combined z's added per million words | As % of baseline z-frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-2020 average (2010–2019) | 5.6 | ~0.13–0.17% |
| 2020 (peak) | 42.2 | ~1.0–1.3% |
| 2021 | 36.2 | ~0.86–1.10% |
| 2024–2026 average | 14.7 | ~0.35–0.45% |
| Whole 2010–2026 period pooled | 16.7 | ~0.40–0.51% |
What this tells us:
1. This is a real, measurable jump — at the 2020 peak, "zoom" alone went from 7.1 per million words (2019) to 41.6 per million (2020), a ~5.9x spike in a single year, and the combined effect of both words was ~7.5x higher than the pre-2020 average.
2. But even at its absolute peak, the effect on letter-z's overall share of the language is still only about 1% — a real bump, not a transformation. z is such a naturally rare letter that even a word going 6x more common barely nudges the aggregate.
3. "Gen Z" is the slower-burning, still-rising story — it wasn't the 2020 spike driver (that was all "zoom"), but it's climbed steadily since, especially 2023–2026, and is still trending up in the most recent data (2.5 per million in 2025) while "zoom" has been declining post-peak.
What would be the letters 'q' and 'x' be in comparison? Maybe 'x' will get skewed because of using 'x' as a multiplicative suffix, such as 5x times, etc?
To actually test this hypothesis, we would want to search NOW for the specific number+x tokens themselves — 2x, 5x, 10x, 100x — not the bare letter "x". This "Nx multiplier" usage is genuinely a 2010s–2020s tech/startup/VC vernacular thing (10x engineer, 10x growth, 100x return), so it plausibly did rise sharply, similar to "zoom."
We do the same NOW corpus process as before — search each of 2x, 5x, 10x by year, and separately search bare x and q for the letter-level baseline comparison.
Source: NOW Corpus (Mark Davies, english-corpora.org), searched Sept 2026. The dashed line marks July 2023, when Twitter rebranded to "X" — the standalone word "x" roughly tripled in the years after, while "q" (no comparable event) trended gently downward across the same period. Two y-axes are used since "x" and "q" occur at different scales.
This turned up something genuinely interesting — and it's not the multiplier suffix, it's Twitter's rebrand to "X" in July 2023.
What the data actually shows:
1. "5x/10x multiplier" hypothesis, checked directly: the tokens 2x, 5x, 10x are all tiny — each sits around 0.3–2.3 per million words the entire period, with only mild growth. Combined, they never add more than ~5 per million words to x's count in any year. This hypothesis basically doesn't pan out — the multiplier-suffix usage is real but numerically negligible next to everything else "x" is doing.
2. The actual disproportionate mover is bare "x" itself — and the timing gives away why. Standalone "x" bounced around 40–60 per million words for thirteen years (2010–2022), then jumped to 92 in 2023, then 162 in 2024 — a 2.8x increase in the 2023–2026 average versus 2010–2022. That inflection point lands exactly on Twitter's rebrand to "X" in July 2023. "X" the platform, "on X", "X post," "X account," etc. is almost certainly the driver — not variable-x, not grading, not the multiplier suffix.
3. q, by contrast, is quietly declining — from 41 per million in 2010 down to ~14 by recent years, a drop to about a third of its earlier rate. No "Gen Q" or "Zoom"-style event has happened to q, so it's drifting down, likely just corpus-composition and register drift over time (more informal/social text pulls down whatever niche uses "q" had, e.g. older texting shorthand).
Putting it against baseline share:
| Letter | Baseline (letters) | Combined bump from tracked terms, peak year | As % of baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| z | 0.07–0.09% | +42/million (2020) | ~1.0–1.3% |
| x | 0.15–0.23% | +167/million (2024, incl. bare "x" spike) | ~1.5–2.4% |
| q | 0.10–0.12% | — (declining, no spike) | n/a |
So the ranking of "disproportionate bump, relative to baseline" is actually x > z > q — the opposite of what the multiplier hypothesis predicted, but for a much better reason: a brand rename literally repurposed a whole letter as a product name, which is a more powerful mechanism than a slang suffix ever was for "zoom" or "Gen Z."
It is the Brahma Muhuratam,
My open portmanteau has no baggage,
As it rests on a bench
of the special platform,
A platform that merges
with the tracks:
And the tracks lead to the Light,
Lead to my Pitru Purush.
No springboard needed
to jump off to the Light.
A tilted lantern tries to hold
a candle to the Light,
But remains unlit, or is blinded,
And a crow waits for its feed
For Pitru Paksh is near,
As is the autumnal equinox.
Do you remember the September
Of a thousand years ago?
When the stars very more
Than the wishes on the earth,
When the moon was very light,
And the breeze was light too,
When love was embroynic,
Before the autumnal equinox,
We were so enchanted
What love would do.
