@hash62.bsky.social

why god why do used book stores use cover-destroying price stickers

Woke up to read Tim Cook, CEO of the world's most valuable company Apple expressing excitement about India's opportunity and Ruchir Sharma back with his seasonal 'India is failing' tour, diligently organised by his lutyens fans. Honestly, I have been following him for just over a decade. Facts: ​He was wrong about digitisation. Wrong about the 2024 'undercurrent.' Wrong about the resilience of domestic markets. Now, he’s targeting AI - ignoring that India is the global leader in AI adoption and home to the world's largest ChatGPT mobile user base. ​While he pines for the Chinese top-down model (read more and you will understand his China worship), India is building Sovereign AI through Bhashini to empower 22 languages and scaling an AI service sector headed for $17B by 2027. ​He keeps on judging India’s 2026 reality with a 1990s manufacturing playbook. Maybe if his fund returns matched his confidence in 'breakout nations' like Turkey or Brazil, people will listen. Every time he does doom-mongering, I remind myself he is chairman of Rockfeller International. Rest my case here.

India just turned on a system that can warn over a billion phones in under 10 seconds. The loud alarm that scared everyone today was the test run. When a flood or an earthquake hits, regular text messages fail. SMS is one-to-one. Each text goes to one phone at a time, and during a real emergency, when the whole country is calling family, the network gets jammed. People wait hours for a warning. Sometimes the warning never gets there at all. The new system, called Cell Broadcast, works like a radio station. The cell tower throws one signal into the air, and every phone in range catches it at the same instant. There’s no queue and no waiting. Millions of phones light up together. The whole thing was built in India, by a government lab called C-DOT. It runs in 19 Indian languages. It doesn’t need a SIM card or mobile data. The signal goes straight from the tower into your phone hardware. It’s also smart enough to aim. The government can send a cyclone warning only to people on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, while Delhi gets nothing. Tsunamis, earthquakes, lightning strikes, gas leaks, and chemical spills are next. India already had a slower version of this. It’s called SACHET, and it has sent 134 billion alerts over the years. Cell Broadcast sits on top of SACHET and kicks in when seconds decide who lives. For context: Japan built this in 2007, after years of earthquakes. The US built theirs in 2012. India just joined the club, and at over a billion phones, this is now one of the biggest emergency broadcast networks on the planet.

That ₹15 lakh from 2014 is worth ~₹23 lakh today, based on USD-INR exchange rate alone, without adjusting for inflation. Just saying.

Did you know Sanjeev Kumar really cut off his hands for his role as Thakur Baldev? Like the dedication 🤌🏼 the commitment 🤌🏼 goddamn modern day Bollywood could never, bro