The scent of jasmine in the Malabar Hill garden was undercut by a sharper, metallic tang in the air—the scent of distant lightning. Harsh felt it in his bones, a pressure change more real to him than any barometer. The un-optimized chaos of Anya's playroom was a sanctuary, but outside its walls, the world's machinery was beginning to scream.
He saw it in the data streams only he thought to cross-reference.
Stream A: Disha's Global Logistics Feed. Shipping container lease rates for the China-US route were not just plateauing; they were falling off a cliff. Orders were being cancelled. Empty steel boxes were piling up in Singapore and Rotterdam. The arteries of global trade were developing blockages.
Stream B: Arogya's Aggregate, Anonymized Biometrics. A slight but statistically significant upward creep in stress indicators (resting heart rate, sleep disruption) across their user base in Western economies. It wasn't illness. It was a low-grade, societal fever.
Stream C: The Raw Feed from "Samanvay's" Global (but limited) User Base. In the finance and real estate "Pratibimb" groups, the tone had shifted. The boasting about flipping condos and no-doc loans was gone, replaced by frantic, jargon-filled whispers about "liquidity," "counterparty risk," and "CDO tranches." The smart money was getting scared.
Stream D: His Private Intelligence Briefings. Vikram Joshi's contacts in the global security world reported unusual movements. Not of troops, but of capital. Gulf sovereign wealth funds were quietly shifting allocations. Swiss private bankers were working through the night.
Alone, each stream was noise. Together, for Harsh, they formed a symphony of impending catastrophe. He had the score because he'd heard it before, in the dying echoes of his first life. The year 2008 wasn't a distant milestone; it was a tidal wave on the horizon, and he was perhaps the only person on Earth who could see its full, shadowy shape.
The architect in him saw a system—the global financial network—that was over-leveraged, opaque, and built on a foundation of liar's loans and mathematical fairy tales. It was a badly designed machine, and it was about to explode.
But the father in him saw something else: an opportunity. Not for greed, but for survival. For sovereignty.
He called a meeting of his most trusted inner circle: Arvind from Semiconductors, Lata from Samanvay, Vikram Joshi, and Meera, the sharp journalist turned head of Patel Strategic Communications. The agenda was simple: "Contingency Gamma."
They gathered in the secure "Map Room" beneath the Foresight Institute, where Disha's core hummed behind reinforced glass.
"A storm is coming," Harsh began, without preamble. He threw the correlated data onto the main screen—the crashing shipping rates overlaid with the spiking stress biometrics. "Not a monsoon. A financial super-cyclone. It will hit the US and Europe first, hardest. Then it will wash over the entire world."
Meera, the journalist, leaned forward. "Evidence? This is… apocalyptic."
"The evidence is in the whispers and the empty containers," Harsh said. "I don't need a smoking gun. I can smell the smoke." He looked at each of them. "Our mission is not to profit from this. Our mission is to ensure that when the tide goes out, India is not left naked."
He laid out the plan, a multi-front preparation:
1. The Fortress (Finance): All Harsh Group holdings were to begin an immediate, silent, six-month liquidity drive. Sell non-core international assets. Call in long-term loans to partner firms gently but firmly. Build a war chest of cash, gold, and government bonds. No exposure to foreign commercial paper. "We will be a rock in the coming flood."
2. The Seed (Infrastructure): "Project Svayambhu" was to go into overdrive. The chip fab needed to achieve not just proof-of-concept, but meaningful production of their "Rishi-28" microcontroller—a simple, rugged chip for power regulators, water pumps, and basic electronics. "When global supply chains shatter, we must be able to make the nervous system for our own essential goods."
3. The Story (Narrative): This was for Meera. "Start a quiet campaign. Not fear-mongering. A narrative of 'resilience.' Stories about Indian companies reducing 'wasteful foreign dependency.' Praise for traditional 'conservative' banking. Prepare the public mind for a shift inward."
4. The Net (Social): Lata's task. "Samanvay" was to subtly promote groups focused on local skills, barter, community kitchens, and repair workshops—digital seed banks for practical, localized survival knowledge. "When the just-in-time economy fails, we need a network of just-in-case communities."
5. The Shield (Security): Vikram Joshi's domain. "The 'Safe Zone' pilot is to be expanded, quietly, around our key facilities—the fab, the R&D campus, the data centers. When scarcity hits, the hungry look for the full granary. We will not be plundered."
The room was dead silent. They were being asked to pivot the entire, sprawling empire on the basis of a feeling and some shipping data.
Arvind, the pragmatist, voiced the doubt. "Sir, if you are wrong… the cost of this retreat, this hibernation, will be immense. We will lose market share, momentum."
Harsh met his gaze. "And if I am right, Arvind, and we do nothing, there will be no market. No momentum. Only ruin." He paused, letting the starkness settle. "I am not asking you to believe in a prophecy. I am asking you to trust that I see the cracks in the dam. We are not fleeing. We are building an ark."
He dismissed them, the weight of the unsaid hanging in the air. They didn't know how he knew. They only knew he had never been wrong about the big things.
Alone in the Map Room, Harsh stared at the global map, lights representing the flow of data and money. He was about to use the ultimate insider information—the memory of a past life—not to cheat, but to protect. To inoculate his company, and by extension, a piece of his country, against a plague he could not stop.
He was no longer just building an empire. He was preparing a lifeboat. And he had less than a year to make it seaworthy.
(Chapter End)