"We found a lot of other Indian expats in the same situation as us - wanting to invest in India for financial and emotional reasons, but unable to do so easily or consistently. We wished a simple product existed to solve for this online. We couldn’t find one, so we built it."
Simple products do exist which provide exposure to passive indexes for India equities in USD.
Any NRI in US can invest in these ETFs at reasonable cost (about 0.64%-0.85% Expense Ratio):
1. Their tracking error (because of frequent currency transactions + cash requirements) cumulates to a large underperformance vs investing directly. In the last 5 years, there's a cumulative return of 14% for INDY vs 69% for NIFTY. Even accounting for currency depreciation and remittance charges, the $ adjusted return for NIFTY is at least 2x.
Even active funds like WAINX, EPGIX havent beaten investing directly over the long run. You can compare these with NIFTY growth % - USD/INR growth % - two-way currency transaction charges to confirm.
This is a fair option for anyone who cant access the Indian markets directly, but for Indians with PAN card, the efficiency of investing directly is much higher.
2. Depth of funds is still not as good as in the Indian market. India has 8000+ mutual funds listed, with specific allocations available to mid cap, small cap, thematic (tech vs pharma vs consumer vs infra), equity-debt hybrid etc.
1975 ACM Turing Award Lecture on "Computer Science as an empirical inquiry: Symbols and Search" by Herbert Simon & Alan Newell (inventors of list processing).
On the non fiction front one that comes to mind is
The economics anti textbook (hill and myatt).
Though this was 12 years ago, public discussion of economics has progressed a little bit since, so it may not have quite the same paradigm busting feeling it did for me back then, but it's still pretty good.
Other mind expanding non fiction...
Feynman lectures (all 3 volumes)
Design patterns (don't hate me lol. Obviously less revelatory if you've already absorbed the knowledge by other means. And for flip's sake don't overdo them! )
Your question resonates with me.
The path, using your programming skills, that I believe has good chances of significantly & rapidly improving compensation is to uplevel your skills & attempt for the highest tier of compensation band by interviewing aggressively.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/360018.360022
Their work on list processing was an inspiration for John McCarthy's famous paper on Lisp:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf