“When you read this on the morning of June 14, I am likely somewhere on the road between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, chasing a version of myself I once didn’t know existed.” Thus begins the lovely essay on his running journey appearing tomorrow in Sunday ET by our colleague Pravin Palande @lonelycrowd who’s running the 85-km Comrades Ultramarathon in South Africa tomorrow. “Seven years ago, this would have been unthinkable. In 2019, I was 47 and could barely manage 5 km without feeling like my heart might blow up my chest.” Truly inspiring. Best wishes Pravin!

What an awful tragedy.

You probably have no idea who Salim Kumar is, but every Indian should read all about him today. Salim Kumar was a Malayalam actor who passed away on Saturday night in Kochi at the age of 56. If you don't watch Malayalam cinema, strap in because his story is one of the most remarkable careers Indian cinema has produced, and it deserves to travel beyond Kerala. He came from nothing. Born in North Paravur, a small town in Ernakulam, into a family that struggled with money. Government school. Graduated from Maharajas College. So, no film connections, no family wealth, no shortcuts. He started as a mimicry artist with Kalabhavan, a performance troupe in Kochi that has been the launchpad for dozens of Malayalam actors. Stage shows, comedy routines, television spots. He was funny in a way that was impossible to ignore, the kind of performer who could make a room laugh in an instant. His first film was Ishtamanu Nooru Vattam in 1997, a small role nobody remembers. For years he played supporting parts & background comedy. Then the 2000s happened. His role as Mattancherry Mammathu in Satyameva Jayathe gave him his first real recognition, and after that the comedy roles started coming fast. Pulival Kalyanam. Thuruppugulan. Kunjikkoonan. Marykkundoru Kunjaadu. If you grew up in Kerala in the 2000s, his face was in half the films you watched. He became the comedian audiences showed up for, the one whose scenes people replayed and quoted at family gatherings. What separated him from most comedians was precision. He did not rely on volume or slapstick. He used his face, his body, his pauses. He could get a laugh from the way he blinked. Directors started writing characters specifically for him, because they knew he would take whatever was on the page and make it three times funnier than they imagined. For over a decade, he was the biggest comic face in Malayalam cinema. Then came 2010 and a film called Adaminte Makan Abu. A quiet, small-budget film directed by Salim Ahamed. The story follows an aging Muslim couple in a Kerala village whose only dream in life is to go on Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. They save every rupee. Things keep falling apart. The film is about their dignity, their patience, and their faith through one disappointment after another. Salim Kumar played Abu. The man who owns nothing except his wife and his belief, and holds onto both with everything he has. There is no comedy in the role. No punchlines, no funny faces, no playing to the gallery. It is the complete opposite of everything audiences had ever seen him do. The entire performance is built on stillness, restraint, and pain carried quietly behind the eyes. He won the National Film Award for Best Actor for it. That is the highest acting honour in Indian cinema. The film was also selected as India's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards (Oscars) that year. In one role, Salim Kumar went from "the funny guy from Malayalam films" to one of the most respected actors in Indian cinema. He simply disappeared so completely into a character that you forgot you were watching a comedian at all. He followed it with more serious work. Achanurangatha Veedu, which won him the Kerala State Award. Traffic, still considered one of the finest ensemble films in Malayalam cinema. Perumazhakkalam. Each time, he proved the National Award was not a fluke. The man had range that most actors who only do drama cannot match. Unfortunately, Salim Kumar suffered from liver cirrhosis, a condition he said was hereditary in his family and not related to alcohol. His brother had the same illness. He underwent a liver transplant a few years ago. He tried naturopathy. He talked about all of it openly, without shame, without self-pity. He kept working between treatments. He kept being funny. He kept showing up, even when his body was failing him. He was also fearlessly outspoken about politics and social issues, which in any film industry can cost you work. He did not care. He said what he believed and lived with the consequences. He passed away Saturday night at a hospital in Kochi. He was 56. The Kerala government bore the funeral expenses and gave him police honours. The Chief Minister paid homage personally. Mammootty, one of the biggest names in Indian cinema, mourned him publicly. Thousands of people lined up at the North Paravur Town Hall on Sunday to say goodbye. 350 films in three decades. A National Award for Best Actor. An Oscar entry. A career that started from mimicry stages and ended at the very top of Indian cinema. The reason most of India does not know his name is because Malayalam cinema, despite being one of the best film industries in the country, still does not get the national attention it deserves. Actors like Salim Kumar live and work in a language bubble, and their stories rarely cross over the way a Bollywood career would. This is a loss for everyone who never got to watch him. A man who came from poverty, made millions laugh, then proved he could make them cry just as hard, and fought his own hardest battle with utmost dignity. If you watch one film after reading this, make it Adaminte Makan Abu. It is a masterpiece.

More than half the Indian AI/consumer startups I meet are quietly running on Chinese open weights - DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi. Nobody puts it in the pitch deck. The math forces the choice. DeepSeek's flagship reasoning model ships output at $3.5 per million tokens. Claude and GPT charge $25–30 for the same tier. That's a 90% price cut, frontier model to frontier model - before you even get to the free, self-hostable open weights. We keep saying "Atmanirbhar Bharat" on stage while our founders build on China's models in private. The technology and cost gap is real - we need to go from customers to challengers.

A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room. She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill. Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final. Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat. Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped. She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won. By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million. One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.

Tata Trusts emphatically denies allegations of improper share transfer, terms petitioner a “serial litigator”.

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 Fresh complaint filed with Maharashtra Charity Commissioner seeks suspension of Tata Trusts meeting scheduled for Monday. Questions legality of four-decades-old share transfer. By @Kala_ET and Rashmi Rajput economictimes.indiatimes.com…

Is this the best World Cup team photo of all time? Bravo, Norway 🇳🇴⚔️

The amount of wealth in NYC is unimaginable.

Physician: Your body has ran out of magnesium. Me: 0mg

In 1955, the Archives of Surgery published a paper titled Management of Adreno-cortical Insufficiency During Surgery, describing the successful operation on a 37 year old Addisonian patient undergoing major spinal surgery. The paper was there in the open, respectably cited and available to anyone inclined to look. The patient's identity, naturally and properly, was withheld. And so the case remained in the annals: visible in every respect, yet detached from the identity that would have revealed its wider significance. Addison's disease begins when the two small adrenal glands that sit above the kidneys fail. They stop producing cortisol, a hormone involved in maintaining blood pressure, blood sugar, energy metabolism, and the body’s response to stress. The simplest tasks (climbing a flight of stairs, rising from a chair) may require an effort out of proportion to their apparent demands. There’s also the matter of stress. Healthy people meet illness, surgery, grief, fear, mental crisis, or injury with an invisible hormonal surge. It’s a physiological reserve they never have to think about. The body prepares itself for adversity. The Addisonian cannot. It’s one of those conditions that reveals how much of what we call character is in fact hormonal physiology. The patient in the paper was John F Kennedy. Five years after the paper was published, he won the US presidential election by a razor thin margin. If voters had learned that the handsome young senator was dependent on corticosteroids, and afflicted by chronic illness, and perhaps engaged in a daily struggle with pain and endocrine failure, Richard Nixon might well have become President instead. So Nixon enters the White House. The Camelot legend never takes hold in America. The Bay of Pigs belongs to another presidency altogether. And the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the nearest our species has come to a collective obituary, is entrusted to another temperament entirely. The Cold War’s most celebrated exhibition of presidential nerve is never performed by a man whose body (undisclosed to the public) required relentless chemical maintenance just to get through the day. For Kennedy, Addison’s was an invisible dependency. He was sustained day to day on a pharmacological scaffolding. It’s quite absurd that the destiny of nations and the continued existence of several hundred million people may have rested, for a time, on the daily successful replacement of a hormone measured in milligrams.

Interesting some data from Copley Research had caught my eye which showed the sharp underweight for India on Morgan funds. Chinese walls and all - I know.

RT @ratnabhushanET: Coca-Cola announces IPO plans for its largest bottling partner HCCB, two years after it first started work on the listi…

Zee secures rights for Fifa World Cup 2025 and 2030. Announcement quotes Swami Vivekananda’s immortal line: “You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.”

🚨 Peak XV, which once had launched Surge to mirror YC's success in India and SEA, is folding the accelerator into its broader early-stage investing. The shift comes as India's seed stage landscape is evolving. All details for @ETtech @samidhas @pranavmukul

At a Mumbai reception by the consulate to mark the 80th anniversary of the Italian republic, under a photo of PM’s Modi and Meloni, bowls of Parle Melody. The first candy to become an artefact of diplomacy? A question only Vikram Doctor can perhaps truly settle.

🚨🚨IMP: Swiggy group CEO Srisharha Majety spoke to us on the recent failed shareholder resolution, governance concerns, M&A talks, growth versus profitability in quick commerce.. His first interview post the May 21 failed shareholder resolution which sought to amend its articles of association as part of a broader push to become an Indian Owned and Controlled Company (IOCC). It failed to secure the required 75% supermajority from investors, falling short by a narrow margin. @pranavmukul @ETtech

Bravo 👏🏾👏🏾

🚨 BREAKING: Investigation has linked improperly fastened nuts to a 🔥 in Air India A320 plane's engine forcing it to do an emergency landing last Thursday: m.economictimes.com/industry… #aviation