Another day, another BWSSB deathtrap. Walking my kid to school just 500m away from home. That's too much by our footpath standards. Accident waiting to happen. (Near DG signal, Padmanabhanagar) @ChristinMP_ @ashwinmahesh @TVMohandasPai @GBAChiefComm @bwssbchairman @GBA_office

Hahahaha

I used to love a web tool called StumbleUpon. Added a button to your browser that would take you to random blogs and websites. Found so much fascinating stuff that way, and it was the antithesis of today’s winner-take-most centralised web.

Paddy Power are the king of adverts and I won’t be told any different

Okay GBA, I accept the #1KmChallenge. I'll walk 1 kilometer. Now a #1KmChallenge for you: Build 1 kilometer of footpath somewhere.

In Ooty stuck behind a massive car pileup as I type this. Insane that the only type of traffic management is redirection. Zero signs of expansion.

I am not kidding one bit when I say this - BJPs best chance of winning and forming a Govt in Karnataka in 2028 is by projecting @hd_kumaraswamy as the CM face. There is not a single leader in BJP Karnataka who can be projected.

Hard agree

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it. Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak. Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people." 1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support. 2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50 clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade. 3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility. 4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing. India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

One corporation became five, yet on the ground, the reality still looks exactly the same. Location: ORR in Kalyan Nagar @HennurBlr

Hahaha

B-SMILE has moved the decision-making about infra in the city farther away from citizens. Simply moving a bunch of BBMP engineers into a new entity and giving them a huge budget isn't going to change either the quality or methods of construction, or even the science behind how decisions are made. Each of the corporations should schedule a B-SMILE public discussion on the projects within their jurisdiction before this goes ahead. @comm_blr_south

Hahaha

Indeed! To conflate a Rasgulla with an Idli is not just a culinary error; it is a profound cosmological misunderstanding. To begin with, the comparison is practically a biological impossibility. She is comparing chhena (the delicate, squeaky, pristine curd of milk) with a meticulously fermented batter of parboiled rice and black gram (urad dal). Their compositions are from entirely different kingdoms. One is an airy, spongy lattice designed to trap light sugar syrup; the other is a dense, wholesome, steamed matrix of complex carbohydrates and proteins. Their taste, consistency, structural integrity, and existential purpose share absolutely nothing in common. But more important, her attempt to dismiss the Idli as merely a blank canvas for sugar syrup does a grave disservice to what is arguably one of the greatest engineering marvels of the culinary world. The Idli is not a mere "bland cake." It is a masterclass in biotechnology. To achieve the perfect Idli is to balance the delicate microflora of wild fermentation over a cold night, resulting in a steamed cloud that is a triumph of gut health, lightness, and nutritional balance. It is a savoury monolith of South Indian culinary genius, perfectly engineered to absorb the sharp tang of a well-spiced sambar or the fiery depth of a molaga-podi (gunpowder) paste infused with cold-pressed sesame oil or nutritious melted ghee. To suggest an Idli would even consent to being drowned in sugar syrup is to fundamentally misunderstand its dignity. If this lady finds Rasgullas overrated, argue that on the merits of their sponginess or sweetness. But please, leave the noble, perfectly fermented, steamed majesty of the Idli out of your dessert-table polemics, ma'am!

THANKS FOR HAVING US @nprmusic!!! #TinyDesk out now: FooFighters.lnk.to/TinyDesk

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

“In Ethiopia, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is.” A remarkable essay on African v American training philosophies. aeon.co/essays/what-ethiopia…

They shot dead Suvendu Adhikari’s PA in West Bengal. Today. I think Mamata Banerjee, Abhishek Banerjee and their pet goons should immediately be arrested and investigated. They are planning to spread anarchy. The blueprint has been hatched. The money is coming from ISI through Hawala channels. The action is being carried out by henchmen from Trinamool who have been smuggled across the border much before and now those sleeper cells have been activated by their masters. Om Shanti 🙏 Chandranath Rath. You will always be remembered as a hero of Sanatan Dharma. @SuvenduWB

This is so so painstaking to even hear.. just could not beyond a point @UnSubtleDesi.. you have Maa Durga’s blessings and may you continue to have that.. finally it’s time TMC pays for their sins.. glad they have been thrown in to the gutter..

Let me explain what just happened today because it deserves so much recognition. GalaxEye is a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Madras engineers. Today they launched Mission Drishti on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is India's largest privately built satellite at 190 kg. And it carries a technology that no commercial satellite has ever carried before. Normal satellites take photos of the Earth using optical cameras. Like your phone camera, but from 500 km up. The problem is obvious. Clouds. Night. Fog. Smoke. If any of these are in the way, the photo is useless. India has monsoon cover for 4 months a year. That is 4 months where optical satellites are partially or fully blind over large parts of the country. The alternative is SAR. Synthetic Aperture Radar. Instead of taking photos with light, it sends radar waves down and reads what bounces back. Radar goes through clouds, through darkness, through smoke. A SAR satellite can image a flooded village at 2 AM during a cyclone when no optical satellite can see anything. The problem with SAR is that the images look nothing like photos. They look like grainy black-and-white radar maps. A military analyst or a trained geospatial engineer can read them. A farmer, a disaster response team, or a city planner cannot. Until today, if you wanted both optical and SAR data for the same location, you needed two different satellites, passing over at different times, at different angles. Then someone had to manually align and fuse the two datasets. Expensive, slow, and the data never perfectly matched because the satellites saw the same spot minutes or hours apart. GalaxEye put both sensors on one satellite. Optical and SAR, fused into what they call OptoSAR. Three times more information than a single sensor. Processed onboard by an NVIDIA AI chip at 1.8 metre resolution. Now in practice, during the next cyclone hitting Odisha, one satellite pass gives you a clear image of which villages are flooded, which roads are cut, and which buildings are standing. Day or night. Cloud or clear. In near real-time. For defence, it means you can monitor a border area 24/7 regardless of weather. For agriculture, it means tracking crop health across an entire monsoon season without a single cloud gap. For infrastructure, it means monitoring construction progress on highways and bridges without waiting for a clear day. GalaxEye tested their SAR tech on ISRO's POEM orbital platform. The satellite was tested at ISRO facilities. IN-SPACe provided regulatory clearance. NSIL, ISRO's commercial arm, will distribute the imagery globally. And it launched on SpaceX because ISRO's PSLV doesn't have the right orbit slot for this mission. Yes, four IIT Madras graduates built a world-first satellite in 4 years in Bengaluru. Take a bow!