Opposing taller buildings in Indian cities is a bizarre leftist position. It ends up punishing the poorest by making drainage, waste management, cables, electricity and public transit far costlier & worse, while forcing endless sprawl where cutting lakhs of trees becomes normal.

People in Tamil Nadu act as though they’ve been living under oppression, mistreated by the DMK government, held at metaphorical gunpoint, and desperately waiting for some saviour to rescue them from imagined horror and slavery.

Raghu Rai’s portfolio of the 1984 Bhopal industrial gas disaster are among the most profound photojournalistic works of the last 50 years raghuraifoundation.org/bhopa…

IIT Bombay research shows that heatwaves over the Indo-Gangetic Plains are primarily driven by local land and atmospheric factors, rather than by hot air travelling from elsewhere. New research led by Prof. Karthikeyan Lanka, Associate Professor, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering and the Centre for Climate Studies at IIT Bombay, shows that not all IGP heatwaves are the same, and the factors driving their origin are more local than distant. iitb.ac.in/research-highligh…

GIFT City, Gujarat ❤️

Why do Indians think skyscrapers are desirable?

Something I keep coming back to: The precision machining cluster in Coimbatore exports to Tier-1 automotive suppliers in Germany. The German buyer knows Coimbatore. The Indian policy conversation doesn't.

கல்பாக்கத்தில் உள்ள 500 மெகாவாட் மின்னுற்பத்தித் திறன் கொண்ட மாதிரி வேக ஈனுலை(Prototype Fast Breeder reactor(PFBR), ஏப்ரல் 6ஆம் தேதி அன்று இரவு 08:25 மணிக்கு முதலாவது அணுப்பிளவு செயல்பாட்டு நிலையை (attaining first criticality (start of controlled fission chain reaction))எட்டியுள்ளது. இது தொடர்பான அறிவிப்பை பிரதமர் மோடி சமூக ஊடகங்களில் வாயிலாக வெளியிட்டார். கடந்த 10 ஆண்டுகால பா.ஜ.க. ஆட்சியில் இந்தியாவில் அறிவியல் மனப்பாங்கு குறைந்து வரும் நிலையில் ஒவ்வொரு அறிவியல் முன்னேற்றங்களையும் அத்தி பூத்தாற்போல வரவேற்க வேண்டியுள்ளது. ஆனால், அதே நேரத்தில் அபாயமிக்க சுற்றுச்சூழலுக்கும் மனித குலத்துக்கும் ஆபத்தான முன்னேற்றங்களைச் சுட்டிக்காட்டுவதும் அவசியமாகிறது. அவ்வகையில் கல்பாக்கத்தில் உள்ள ஈனுலையின் முன்னேற்றங்களை நாம் கண்டிக்கிறோம். முழு விவரம்: poovulagu.org/statements/fas… #fastbreederreactor #kalpakkam #modi #bjpgovernment #pooovulaginnanbargal

I think romantic movies do so well in India is because people get to live vicariously. In their own lives, they don't really get to date, fall in love, marry the person of their choice. They are deprived of such a basic human instinct.

Let's look at a counterfactual. What if government spending on R&D is completely slashed? Will corporate R&D follow different and perhaps more efficient path dependencies in raising overall productivity? Soviet Union spend a lot of R&D and much of it didn't translate into productivity. Maybe there is "tech search space" in abstraction that's better perused by markets forces than public R&D?

The core analytical error in the "primary energy fallacy" argument, that renewables plus electrification will dramatically cut total energy needs, is that it treats energy as interchangeable. A TWh of gas isn't just energy. It's dispatchable, energy-dense, and seasonally storable. A TWh of solar is none of those things without substantial infrastructure to make it so. The leap from "EV motors are more efficient than combustion engines" to "the transition is easier than you think" skips over the hardest parts of the problem. Electrification can eliminate some conversion losses while introducing new ones, like curtailment, storage round-trip losses, overbuild, and grid expansion. If we look at how much infrastructure is needed to support an electric heat pump with renewables in the dead of winter, we'll see that gas delivers far more value than a Sankey diagram shows.