Author: Avi Sheshachalam
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Critical Minerals & the Modern World – Potash
I started writing about critical minerals for two reasons. First, I wanted to understand them better: what they actually are, where they show up in daily life, and why they matter beyond policy briefs and headlines. Second, I wanted to explore the kind of leverage they give Canada as it navigates a world that is Read more
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Canada, China, and the Economic Diversification Conversation We Keep Avoiding
The trade headlines are familiar by now. Canola tariffs. Electric vehicle duties. Strong language about sovereignty and who “needs” whom. But behind the headlines is a quieter story that deserves more attention. It is a story about farmers under strain, auto workers facing uncertainty, and a country trying to figure out how to trade in Read more
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Critical Minerals & the Modern World – Uranium
Read the other articles in this series here: Uranium: The Base Layer We Forgot to Talk About Every serious conversation about growth eventually runs into the same constraint: energy. Healthcare systems do not function without it. Data centres cannot scale without it. Manufacturing, water treatment, national defence, climate adaptation, and AI infrastructure all sit on Read more
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Critical Minerals and the Modern World – Graphite
Read the other parts here: Coal for Christmas Every December comes with a familiar warning: be naughty, and you get coal. Carbon, in the cultural imagination, is punishment: dirty, primitive, unwanted. The Grinch doesn’t hand out lithium. He hands out a black lump wrapped in disappointment. But carbon has always had a double life. On Read more
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Part 4: Rare Earths, Magnets, and the Hidden Architecture of Power
Read the other articles in this series here: The Night the Sky Turned Green I had been in Canada only a few weeks. It was a warm autumn evening in Edmonton. Too many cinnamon whiskeys. A long walk home; I noticed a faint green blur in the sky. I dismissed it as city light, maybe Read more
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Critical Minerals & The Modern World – Nickel
Critical Minerals & The Modern World – Nickel Avi Sheshachalam Innovation. Partnership. Strategy December 9, 2025 Read Part 1 (Lithium) and Part 2 (Cobalt) here. A Leadership Lunch That Shifted My Thinking I began thinking differently about nickel during a lunch hosted through the Aga Khan Foundation Canada Global Leadership Program. My cohort and I Read more
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Critical Minerals & The Modern World – Cobalt
Cobalt: The Metal We Never See, But Cannot Live Without Part 2 of “Critical Minerals & The Modern World” Read Part 1 – Critical Minerals & The Modern World – Lithium Cobalt A boy crawls out of a narrow pit on the outskirts of Kolwezi. His hands are coated in blue dust. His feet are Read more
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Critical Minerals and the Modern World – Lithium
I started writing about critical minerals for two reasons. First, I wanted to understand them better: what they actually are, where they show up in daily life, and why they matter beyond policy briefs and headlines. Second, I wanted to explore the kind of leverage they give Canada as it navigates a world that is Read more
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution Has a Gut Problem
We like to talk about “industrial revolutions” as if they’re clean breaks with the past: steam, electricity, computing, AI. In reality, each wave carried the same pattern forward: innovation without people at the centre, value and wealth accumulating with a small group, and everyone else left to adapt to the consequences. You can see this Read more
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Cold War Dressed in Silicon
On pluralism, tech oligarchs, and the shape of AI sovereignty Pluralism entered my life long before artificial intelligence did. Even before I joined the Aga Khan Foundation Canada Global Leadership Program, I had already been wrestling with the idea that societies survive not by sameness, but by holding together many identities, many truths, and many Read more