Philip George

Doing It Again Cause I Never Gave Up🚀

Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once. The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth. For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time. They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks. Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question. About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.

You remember the auction room of 2018. Some kid from Patiala, barely old enough to vote, zero first class games to his name, suddenly worth 4.8 crore. It looked like the kind of punt that destroys franchises. 7 years on, that same kid is hitting sixes like his life depends on it. Because it does. From 2019 to 2022, Prabhsimran played just 6 IPL games. Punjab kept the chequebook open, kept him on roster, kept whispering about potential. But potential without release rots you. You spend nights in hotels carrying water bottles. You watch Gayle & Dhawan do your job. You start believing the auction price was a curse, not a blessing. He ran to stay human. 7 kilometers, then 8. Every morning. The burning in his lungs was better than the silence of the bench. Sachin Tendulkar told him something once; He said most boys would kill to sit where he sat. Told him to find contentment there. Sounds like advice for a monk, not a cricketer. But Prabhsimran clung to it. Then 2023 happened. The Impact Player rule dropped. Purists screamed about death of cricket. For Prabhsimran, it was oxygen. He could swing from ball one without worrying about the collapse. 13th May 2023, Kotla. Delhi Capitals had them against the wall. He walked in & played the innings of his life. First 30 balls: 27 runs. Next 35: 76 runs. No other batter crossed even 20 runs for his team while he scored his 1st IPL century. Delhi missed the playoffs. Prabhsimran found himself. But that is not why he bats like his life depends on it. You need to meet Sardar Surjit Singh, His father. Kidney failure. Three sessions a week hooked to machines. The house in Patiala is heavy with it. The only time the old man lights up is when his son opens for Punjab. They carry him to the couch before every game. Position the TV. For 3 hours, the sickness vanishes. Think about that weight. Every boundary is not runs for him, It is medication. Every six is oxygen for an old man. When he says he plays for his father, he means it literally. The single joy in a week of hospital corridors & medical debt. Come the 2025 auction, Punjab retained 2 players only. Shashank Singh & him. 4 crore for a keeper who had spent 4 years doing mostly nothing. He repaid them with 549 runs at 160 strike rate. Shreyas Iyer gave him something simple; Freedom. Told him he was senior now. Told him one bad game would not end him. Freedom to fail. Now he is flying. Strike rate pushing 173 this season. 80* against Mumbai off 39 balls. 51 off 25 against SRH. Each innings bigger than the last: 37, then 43, then 51, then 80*. The boy who waited is now the man who delivers.

Your brain recognizes the shape of a tree in 50 milliseconds, way before you're consciously aware of what you're seeing. And within seconds, your stress levels start to drop, not because of fresh air but because of the shape itself. Trees are what mathematicians call a fractal. The trunk splits into branches, those split into smaller branches, those into twigs. Same pattern, every scale. You see this design in coastlines, rivers, clouds, even the blood vessels in your own lungs. A physicist at the University of Oregon named Richard Taylor has been measuring this for years. He hooks people up to brain-wave monitors, shows them different images, and tracks what happens. Trees win. When people look at the kind of fractals you find in branches and bark, stress drops by up to 60%. A Swedish researcher named Caroline Hagerhall found the same thing: fractal images trigger alpha waves in your brain, the wave pattern your brain produces when you're calm but still awake. The swaying matters because your brain runs two attention systems. One is involuntary, stuff grabbing your focus whether you want it to or not. The other is directed, the one you actively control when you concentrate or resist checking your phone. Directed attention is a limited resource. It drains. City life burns through it fast: every notification, every ad, every car you dodge crossing the street. Tree branches moving in wind hold your involuntary attention just enough to be interesting, kind of like watching a campfire, but not so much that your directed system has to engage. One system stays gently occupied while the other recharges. Psychologists call this "soft fascination." People at the University of Michigan tested this in 2008. They had volunteers walk for about an hour through either a tree-filled park or through downtown streets, then retake memory and attention tests. The park walkers improved their scores by 20%. Downtown walkers showed zero improvement. Walking on a treadmill didn't help either, so the benefit came from the trees, not the exercise. In 2015, researchers at Stanford went further. They scanned people's brains before and after 90-minute walks. Nature walkers showed less activity in the brain region that controls rumination, when your mind gets stuck replaying the same negative thoughts in a loop. City walkers showed no change in that region at all. The dose is small. A 2019 Michigan study measured cortisol (the hormone your body pumps out when you're stressed) from saliva samples. Just 20 to 30 minutes in any place that felt natural, a backyard, a park, anything with some green, dropped cortisol 21% per hour beyond its normal daily decline. You don't even need to go outside. Roger Ulrich published a study in the journal Science back in 1984, tracking 46 surgery patients across nine years of hospital records. Patients whose bed had a window facing trees recovered almost a full day faster than patients facing a brick wall (7.96 days vs 8.70), needed less pain medication, and got 3.5 times fewer negative notes from nurses. Stress-related illness costs the US over $300 billion a year. A window with a tree outside it costs close to nothing.

Every year, he adds something new. This year - The Hazlewood Bluff Ball. 1/3 #IPL2026

@kuzhi__madiyan If he was truly selfless and wanted the team win, he should have retired himself out at the end of the 16th over. He knows his limitations against yorker lengths. Brewis & Dube had to face those last 18 balls.

Have an unpopular opinion that Sanju did play for his hundred yesterday. He tried to attack in a very safe way with DC bowlers nailing the yorkers helping him. His celebration meant that he badly wanted that hundred playing for CSK!

When someone you love offers a bid for connection, you say yes every time. When someone sends you an article, a video, a funny post, it’s a bid for connection. They are trying to connect with you. When someone shares details about their day, their life, their thoughts, or their feelings with you, that is a bid for connection. They want to connect with you on a deeper level. They are trying to pull you into their world. If you love them, you say yes every time. Yes, even if the article they send is not particularly interesting to you. Yes, even if it means listening to them ramble about a game you don’t care about and think is stupid. Yes yes yes. And let’s hope they always say yes to your bids, too. — Unknown

"Imagine your sister" No.... Develop empathy without imagining her to be your sister or mom.... Develop basic humanity.....

Already seeing a zip of his deliveries. That short ball is gonna fool a few batters thinking "oh let's tonk it" Very impressive skills & looks a nice guy :)

@kuzhi__madiyan KL-ish flick! So smooth

That shot at 18.4 against Meredith, not sure how Sanju pulled it off. Insane skill! Personally my all time favourite shot of Sanju. Now he would have pulled the same length to deep square leg either for six or getting caught.

Sachin Tendulkar is the epitome of longevity in cricket. 34357 runs in a 24 year career is approximately 1431 runs per year. Having such a career when you face Wasim, Warne, Murali, Vaas, McGrath, Pollock, Waqar, Donald for a fair chunk of your career is impressive. Even when he turned 34, he scored 8272 runs in 2007-11 at an avg of 54.78 across formats. This is the age, where a batsman usually starts regressing. For Sachin that happened in 2012-13, arguably 2 most ordinary years of his career, but other than its gold. Pure gold.

I know everyone is bored with no cricket. But not bored enough to suddenly bring up the discussion of dropping KL Rahul from ODIs. Give him a break.

Good on BCCI shelling out that much money after the t20 World Cup win, the cricketers deserve it for all the hard work and efforts, not easy winning at home with so much pressure!! But the disparity shouldn’t be this alarming!!! The women won the bigger price against all odds inspite of not being favourites! An 80 cr price difference doesn’t paint a pretty picture!!!!

@cricketingview So true, its also a reality that "x" was forever excluded. Maybe we can agree "x" was not among their favourites. They even found a way to keep "x" out of the Asian games squad in 2023.

"selectors were unfair to player x" is not a criticism of the selectors. It's impossible to select a team fairly. Selection is unfair by definition. So , to say that the selectors have been unfair to x is the same as saying "x is my favorite"

@cricketingview @SamRoy84 The above replies are not just for the sake of arguing. Explain your point of view. We dont have to agree on everything.

@cricketingview @SamRoy84 Its the job of the selectors to just pick one or two players in a squad. 13 players are an automatic pick. They did this same BS with SKY & Samson for that one important position. One major decision which quite straightforward. Why wasn't a successful Samson picked in 2023?

This whole business of "Samson has been treated badly by the selectors" is BS. Between the 2024 and 2026 World Cups only Abhishek Sharma and SKY had more IND caps than Samson. One good rule of thumb is to assume that any criticism of the selectors is BS.

Samson was in fine form before the 2023 odi wc squad selection. SKY never saw form. It was a reasonable "like for like" substitute to pick Samson over SKY. Why don't we ever read something this👆? Oh yeah, they are not idiots-they are just biased.

When questioned about Samson missing out in any squad announcement PC, he rues it off as if he doesn't have time to debate that. Sarcasm all over his face & tone!

Any person with a slight amount of sense would understand how disappointed Agarkar was in announcing that squad without Gill. He kept saying the coach&captain insisted on this combination & we are doing that. He ensured to praise Gill who missed out than those picked.