VINAY MUNDHE

A Software Developer Writing on Tech, Money, and Life

Author: Vinay Mundhe

  • An Expensive Habit

    An Expensive Habit

    People have expensive habits.

    Some drink. Some smoke. Some chew tobacco. I have a more expensive vice: having coffee at cute places with great ambience, where I get some of my best ideas.

    This expensive habit of mine recently led me to Blue Tokai in Kothrud.

    My wife and I were sitting there, discussing life, future plans, and everything in between, when it was time to pay the bill. For one iced latte, the bill came to ₹273.

    ₹273 for a coffee is a lot in a country where people happily drink ₹10 chai.

    Charging ₹100+ for a cappuccino or iced latte is now completely normal in Pune. Sometimes I feel like if you live in one of India’s top metro cities, you’re paying a tax on everything.

    Your coffee is expensive.

    You pay extra rent.

    You pay for parking.

    You pay for playing sports.

    You pay extra for movie tickets.

    You pay a premium for restaurants.

    All of this would be easier to accept if I were living in a highly developed country where roads are clean, where I can walk on a footpath without worrying about a two-wheeler coming at me, where roads don’t randomly get dug up and stay that way for months, and where stepping out of town on a weekend doesn’t mean spending half your life stuck in traffic.

    Here, there are lines everywhere.

    Traffic everywhere.

    Construction everywhere.

    So does it really make sense to pay so much, directly and indirectly, just for the privilege of living in a metro city in India?

    Sometimes I wish I could go back to my hometown.

    Have a ₹20 samosa, sit peacefully, and not pay extra for everything.

    But the reality is that there’s not much to do there. After five days, I’d probably find myself wanting to come back to Pune.

    Another thing that bothers me is how often we hear that economic development equals GDP growth, and how we’re now the world’s fifth-largest economy.

    But this “Top 5 economy” or “trillion-dollar economy” hasn’t really made my day-to-day life noticeably better.

    Which makes me think GDP alone isn’t the right metric to judge quality of life.

    So, sorry Modi ji.

    As much as I appreciate a lot of the work you’ve done and the national confidence you’ve brought, I still feel we’re a long way from being a truly developed country.

    The one thing that keeps me optimistic is the freedom this country still gives me. The freedom to build something, earn more, travel, invest, and create the life I want.

    If that starts getting taken away through excessive control over what I do, what I watch, where I go, where I invest, or through constant moral policing, then I might genuinely start thinking about leaving.

    Because who doesn’t love the freedom to live life on their own terms!

  • At noon, maids own the affluent societies

    At noon, maids own the affluent societies

    At noon, maids own the affluent societies of the Indian metro cities.

    Since i work from home and occasionally go out for the gym in the noon, I see maids everywhere…  walking intentionally across the streets, catching lifts, chatting in groups, even giving each other a high-five while passing.

    And somehow, I feel they know this place better than I do, and probably know more about the people living here as well. Every flat, every family, their weird habits… and then I secretly hope our cleaning lady doesn’t gossip about us with her friends.


    It’s true that when a certain portion of society does well, even the less fortunate also get benefitted. But only those who work hard. If you know how to chew, you eventually get your pie.

    But still seeing so many maids wandering everywhere is weird. While the flat owners are either in the office or working from inside the four walls of their home.

    It’s similar to how rich people’s drivers usually get to drive their luxury cars and ‘get the feel’.

  • What Rich People Understand and We Don’t

    What Rich People Understand and We Don’t

    Most of us live our lives in a loop of short-term decisions. We studied in college just to pass the next semester, not necessarily thinking about how those programming languages or engineering concepts would become our daily bread years later.

    If we had known then that our studies were the foundation of a decade-long career, we would have approached them with a completely different intensity. This is the core difference between the wealthy and everyone else: The ability to think in decades, not days.

    The “Jio” Strategy: A Lesson in Long-Term Planning

    Consider how the ultra-wealthy, like the Ambanis, operate. When Jio was launched, they provided free internet and SIM cards for a long time. They absorbed massive losses for years just to build a habit in the consumer.

    They weren’t looking at the quarterly profit; they were looking at a 10-year horizon to build a digital ecosystem that now includes everything from 4G to streaming services like JioHotstar. That is long-term thinking in action.

    Applying Longevity to Your Daily Choices

    This mindset isn’t just for billionaires; it’s for our personal lives too.

    • Fitness vs. Instant Gratification: When you’re hungry, a pizza or chole bhature looks great. But if you visualize yourself 20 years down the line, how you want to look and feel, you might choose the healthy meal instead.
    • The Cost of Inconsistency: Many of us start projects… a YouTube channel, a side hustle, a fitness journey and quit halfway. Consistency is often the missing ingredient. We often quit because we don’t have a long-term point of view on how big something can actually become.

    The Three Verticals of Investment

    Success isn’t just about your bank account; it’s about how you invest in the three main “verticals” of your life:

    1. Relationships: Whether it’s your family, spouse, or friends, these are the people who will stand by you through thick and thin. Actively “invest” in these bonds because they provide the emotional dividends that money can’t buy.
    2. Career: Learning shouldn’t stop at graduation. Whether you are in software or mechanical engineering, you must constantly “add-on” to your skills throughout the years.
    3. Fitness: As the saying goes, “Jaan hai toh jahaan hai” (If there is life, there is the world). If you aren’t fit, every other area of your life will eventually suffer.

    Don’t Do It Alone

    A final piece of advice: find mentors who are just one or two years ahead of you. They are close enough to your current struggle to give you practical advice on the mistakes they just made. It is your job to seek out this guidance. Learning from their mistakes is much less painful than learning from your own.

    The takeaway?

    Stop solving for today. Start building for the person you want to be ten years from now.

    I have soft launched my YouTube channel and having such unfiltered raw discussions with the camera over there.

    Here’s the link: What Rich People Understand and We Don’t

  • A Hedge Against the Falling Rupee

    A Hedge Against the Falling Rupee

    Every Indian investor keeps talking about SIPs, large caps, small caps, and midcaps. But hardly anyone talks about something just as important:

    Your wealth is tied to the rupee, and the rupee keeps falling.

    See the following image. This is Rupee depreciation eating into your global purchasing power. You feel rich in INR. You feel average in USD. A big reason for the current FII outflow.

    This is why I’m slowly increasing my U.S. stock allocation.

    Let me break it down simply.

    My current split

    Right now, I have around 18–20% of my portfolio in U.S. equities.
    I’m planning to increase this to 30% over time.

    Not in a hurry.
    Not trying to time anything.
    Just a slow shift.

    Why?

    Because your money is silently losing value when the rupee weakens.

    The math nobody talks about

    This year, the rupee went from ₹83.30 → ₹90.50 against the dollar.

    That’s almost 7 rupees of decline.

    If you had simply held USD, without touching stocks, without doing anything fancy…

    ₹100 worth of dollars would’ve silently turned into ₹108.
    Zero effort.
    Zero stock market risk.
    Pure currency effect.

    Your money grows without the market helping you.

    Now imagine combining this with strong U.S. stocks like
    Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Broadcom…

    You get a double benefit:

    • USD appreciation
    • U.S. market returns

    Meanwhile, inflation in India + rupee depreciation eats away your returns here.

    This is the part people usually ignore.

    Not running away from India, I’m just being practical

    I still invest heavily in India.
    My high-conviction bets are Indian companies (you already know them).
    But the rupee is not your friend long-term.

    Every decade, it quietly steals from you.

    That’s why I’m adding this hedge.

    How I’m doing it (simple strategy)

    I’m doing three things:

    • Adding slowly to major U.S. tech names
    • Keeping SIPs running in Indian MFs
    • Rebalancing whenever things look off

    30% U.S. exposure is enough to protect the downside and benefit from global growth.

    The takeaway

    Invest in U.S because:

    • Your rupee is weakening
    • Your global purchasing power matters
    • USD appreciation cushions your long-term returns
    • You want a portfolio that works in any scenario

    A simple hedge.
    A smart move.
    And something we Indians should consider seriously.

  • Problem Solvers, Not Coders

    Problem Solvers, Not Coders

    If you’re a software developer in 2025, here’s the harsh truth:
    AI can write cleaner code than you.
    And faster.
    And without taking tea breaks.

    But let me assure you… the companies still need you.

    Not because you can write a controller class or map a JSON properly. But because you can solve problems that AI still can’t understand.

    Let me explain.

    1. Modern backend work is not “write Java code → commit → done.”

    Every system today is a giant maze of services, downstream integrations, rules, edge cases, legacy decisions, and business logic stitched together over many years.

    AI can generate code, sure.
    But can it understand why a downstream service is silently swallowing errors for New York state only?
    Can it debug a 500 that only appears in QA at 3 PM when a specific flag is ON?
    Can it map different responses while also ensuring no other state is impacted?

    No. That’s your job.

    Backend development is not about syntax.
    It’s about context.

    2. The winners in AI era will be “connect-the-dots” engineers

    AI is a beast at tasks.
    But AI still struggles with relationships:

    • Why this field exists
    • How one decision breaks five other flows
    • How legacy systems behave
    • Why a business constraint matters
    • How to design for long-term, not just patchwork

    This is where real engineers win.

    When you can look at a messy system, ask the right questions, and find the real root cause behind an issue… that’s a superpower.

    AI can give answers.
    But it still can’t understand the exact problem.

    3. Every company has complex operations and they need humans with expertise

    You’ve probably seen this in your own job:
    Even simple requests blow up into multi-branch logic, state-specific rules, lookups, transformations, and 10 other conditions.

    AI can’t read 20 years of operational history.
    You can.

    That’s why backend developers who learn to think like problem solvers will grow fast.

    4. How to upgrade yourself starting today

    Here’s what I’m doing in my own journey:

    • I’m learning domain modelling, not just mapping
    • I’m understanding system behaviour, not just services
    • I’m learning to ask: what problem are we solving?
    • I’m building real projects like VinAsset to learn design thinking and practice

    Coding is important.
    But connecting dots is everything.

    The takeaway

    AI won’t replace backend developers who think clearly, understand business deeply, and solve problems at a system level.

    If you want to survive this decade, become the engineer who sees what AI doesn’t:

    The why behind the what.
    The connection behind the code.
    The problem behind the symptom.