Umashankar A S

@thekaipullai The story at Pune airport is not much different!

Any warmth, optimism and positivity that you have towards Chennai evaporates the moment you try catching a cab after stepping out of the airport Because unlike most cities where you get out, open an app, book a cab and go, in Chennai you have to Haul your luggage in the enervating heat to an overcrowded buggy stand. Then wait for an buggy which takes an eternity to arrive. Into which you are then stuffed like a sardine in a can and driven for 20 mins to a god forsaken "mall" Where you again have to compete with a batallion of tired and hungry travellers and their luggage to get onto an elevator Which will take you 3 floors up to a taxi stand where you hope there is cab available Which will then drive you down those very three floors to take you into the city I seriously cannot comprehend how the supposedly knowledgeable Chennai people messed up something as simple as an Airport cab pick up All of Chennai's aspirations to be a megapolis dies in that gap between the airport arrival and that cab pickup station

Whoa, too good 😊

@pHequals7 Of course, service provider headcount will reduce.

@pHequals7 Indian IT service providers usually code in the client's network and the software runs on the client's environment, at least for large banking clients. So isn't inference cost the bank's problem and not the service provider's?

@vinaykesari @pHequals7 Superbly written and a timely warning!

While I'm not pushing back on any of the conclusions, one kutti thought for you - as soon as $ denominated spending of Indian residents on AI tools crosses meaningful sums, the major players will (for various reasons) almost certainly set up a local entity in India which will bill Indians. This will moderate the impact on CAD because this localy entity's ability to repatriate earnings (royalty, dividends, etc.) will be constrained by the Indian forex architecture, whose job it is to help control CAD.

There is so much recent negativity about @airindia that I want to put this out. I have taken 3 flights on @airindia in the last three days. On Wednesday:Rome to Del On Thursday: Del to Bom On Friday: Bom to Del In every single case the flight was on time. The inflight service was warm & efficient. Luggage came relatively quickly (quickest in Del) The check in was entirely painless I don’t think frequent travellers care as much as others about airline food but if you think that’s important then I had a very good dinner on Rome to Del. On the international sector I flew one of the older Dreamliners & I am not one of those aeroplane nerds but I thought it was very comfortable. It’s second nature for many of us to bitch about @airindia but it’s one of only two international airlines I fly regularly. The other is @emirates which admittedly is far better ( & far more expensive) but it is the best airline in the world so it’s better than every other carrier anyway. The Tatas need to hold their nerve. There is a lot that is good about @airindia that rarely gets acknowledged @TataCompanies

@jopriyu267 @ArunKrishnan_ Very well said, thanks for sharing your personal journey. More power to you, and may more parents think like this and give their kids some headroom! I do see more parents giving that headroom of late..

I am going to write something personal here. Not because I am chasing engagement, but because maybe this reaches someone who thinks their life has ended because of a number on a marksheet. I scored 49 percent in my 12th.😂 Yes, that kind of number that makes relatives go quiet, neighbors suddenly interested, and well wishers turn into philosophers overnight. I ended up doing a BSc, the kind of course people treat like a backup plan. There were reasons. There always are. But I am not here to explain those. I am here to look you straight in the eye, students and parents alike, and say this. A child’s life does not peak at 17. They have an entire lifetime ahead of them. They will stumble, recalibrate, change direction, and figure things out in ways no one can plan for them. I figured it out. Today I work in a niche field. I am doing well. I earn more than enough to run a home and even buy some whimsies, I work with global clients, and I am trusted with work that actually matters. This is not me bragging . This is me providing evidence. A low percentage in 12th is not the end of the road. It is not even a proper beginning. It is just one data point in a very long story. I grew at my own pace. Others will grow at theirs. And if you let them breathe, truly breathe, they might surpass everything you thought was possible. So maybe instead of pushing harder, we pause a little. Just put your hand on his/her back and laugh with them. Because sometimes all someone needs to succeed is the space to catch their breath.

@vinodsrinivasan Terrific article 👏

I was on a train in Tokyo. We stopped between stations. Announcement in Japanese, then in English: "We apologize for the delay. We will resume shortly." The delay was maybe 3 minutes. Not a big deal. When the train started moving again, another announcement: "We sincerely apologize for the delay. We were stopped for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable. Thank you for your patience." Three minutes and twenty seconds. They measured it exactly. And called it unacceptable. When I got off at my stop, there were station staff on the platform bowing and handing out delay certificates. I took one out of curiosity. It was an official document stating that the train had been delayed by 3 minutes and 20 seconds, signed and stamped. The staff member said in English "for your employer. So they know the delay was not your fault." I said I'm a tourist, I don't need it. He looked confused. "But the delay affected you. You deserve an apology." Three minutes. They were treating a three-minute delay like a major incident. Later I mentioned this to a Japanese friend. They said "oh yes, delay certificates are normal. Trains are supposed to be exactly on time. If they are late, they must apologize." I said three minutes isn't late, it's nothing. My friend said "in Japan, three minutes is late. On time means on time. Not approximately on time." They said the train company probably investigated why there was a 3-minute delay. "They will find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again." I kept the certificate. It's framed in my apartment now. A reminder that somewhere in the world, people care about three minutes. © 6IX.

@Iyervval @abplive "Yeh edit mat karna" is the killer

😂😂😂 @abplive was with Mamata, now is with us…….. tap tap on the shoulder …… “don’t edit this out” 😂😂😂😂

Balakrishna Menon- PG in literature and law, courses in journalism. Participated in independence movement. Had a warrant for arrest. Wanted to expose "Sadhus" as a journalist. Then something happened. Who is Balakrishna Menon? It is none other than Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati and today is his birth anniversary. He was born on 8th May 1916. Two events changed him. 1st a visit to sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi in 1936. 2nd - In 1947, a visit to Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh. On 5 Feb 1949, the holy day of Mahashivratri, Balan was initiated into sannyasa and over time, became hugely respected Swami Chinmayananda. He inspired the formation of Chinmaya Mission, a worldwide nonprofit organisation, to spread the knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other ancient Hindu scriptures.

@palkisu Superb Palki ji, it is high time global stories are told from an Indian lens.

#IndiaGlobalReview #IGR An important announcement ⬇️

@greatbong Very well written and a thoroughly enjoyable read 👏

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!

@PawanKalyan @jsaideepak Excellent initiative Pawan Kalyan ji 🙏🙏

On the sacred occasion of the 259th Birth Anniversary of Saint Tyagaraja, I offer my humble tributes to one of India’s greatest composer-saints, whose music transformed devotion into an eternal spiritual path and enriched the cultural soul of Bharat. Sri Tyagaraja, born in Kakarla village of Prakasam district in Andhra Pradesh, remains a source of immense pride for the Telugu people. His contribution to Carnatic classical music is unparalleled. His compositions, rooted in devotion and enriched with philosophical depth, have elevated our musical tradition and brought enduring recognition to the richness of Telugu language and culture. As one of the revered Trinity of Carnatic music, alongside Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri, Saint Tyagaraja elevated Indian classical music to unparalleled spiritual and artistic heights. Deeply inspired by Purandara Dasa and immersed in devotion to Lord Sri Rama, he dedicated his entire life to composing music that united philosophy, emotion, and divine experience. Musical tradition reveres Saint Tyagaraja as the composer of nearly 24,000 kritis. Yet, only about 730 compositions survive today, and barely 400 continue to live through active performance.This reality is a solemn reminder of our collective duty to urgently preserve, protect, and pass on this invaluable musical heritage to future generations His immortal compositions like Jagadananda Karaka, Endaro mahanubhavulu, Bantu Reeti Koluvu, Samajavaragamana, and Nagumomu continue to inspire musicians and devotees across the world, rising above barriers of language and geography. Legendary maestros M. S. Subbulakshmi, Mangalampalli Balamuralikrishna, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, and D. K. Pattammal carried his divine music across continents, sharing the spiritual brilliance of Tyagaraja and richness of Carnatic music tradition with audiences around the world My personal association with Chennai gave me the opportunity to witness the profound devotion with which Tyagaraja Aradhana is celebrated at Tiruvaiyaru in Tamil Nadu. Similar reverence is also seen in Hampi, Karnataka. Having witnessed this devotion across states, it becomes our cultural responsibility to celebrate Saint Tyagaraja’s legacy with equal devotion in Andhra Pradesh the land connected to his origins. As custodians of this rich civilizational heritage, we reaffirm our commitment to preserve, nurture and strengthen the musical and spiritual heritage of Saint Tyagaraja and other great Telugu saint-poets such as Bammera Pothana and Annamacharya. With this vision, the following cultural initiatives should be encouraged and advanced through the collective efforts of government, cultural institutions, and society at large. • State-level Tyagaraja Aradhana Utsavams in Andhra Pradesh: Institutionalizing annual celebrations with participation from leading musicians, scholars, students, and devotees from across Bharat and the world. • Comprehensive Digitization Mission: Digitization of manuscripts, notations, rare recordings, oral traditions, and archival materials related to Saint Tyagaraja’s compositions in coordination with the Department of Culture. #Tyagaraja

@GabbbarSingh Too good 😁

Nike spent ten years trying to break the 2-hour marathon. They named a project after it. They built special shoes. They paid the greatest marathoner alive to chase it. Yesterday, a Kenyan runner finally did it in 1:59:30, wearing Adidas. Sabastian Sawe used to be a pacemaker. A pacemaker is the kind of runner you hire to set the speed for the first few miles of a race and then drop out before the finish. In January 2022, Sawe got booked to do exactly that at a half-marathon in Spain. He'd never raced more than three miles in his life. He stayed in for the full 13 and won the whole thing. Adidas signed him not long after. Four years later, he became the first human ever to run an official marathon under 2 hours. Nike, meanwhile, started this whole project in 2016 with a public goal called "Breaking2." They paid for the shoes, the pacemakers, the science labs, and Eliud Kipchoge himself. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but the event was a closed-course exhibition with rotating pacemakers and a pace car projecting a green laser line onto the road. The sport's governing body never recognized it as a real race. It didn't count. Then Nike's running business cratered. Digital sales fell 26% in one quarter. Their share of footwear sold at Dick's Sporting Goods went from 39% to 32% in five months. On Running grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion between 2020 and 2025. Hoka nearly quadrupled. Roger Federer left Nike for On. Nike's board fired the CEO in October 2024. Adidas spent the same period building a better shoe. The new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 took three years to develop. It weighs 97 grams, about 3.4 ounces, lighter than a deck of cards. A Wall Street Journal-cited study found that wearing a shoe 3.5 ounces lighter saves a runner around 57 seconds across a marathon. Sawe beat the third-place finisher by 58 seconds. Adidas also did something Nike never did for Kipchoge. They wrote a $50,000 check to the official anti-doping body for track and field, asking it to test Sawe more aggressively than any other runner alive. He got tested 25 times in the two months before last year's Berlin Marathon, and Adidas signed up to fund this for the length of his contract. The logic: the moment Sawe ran a marathon this fast, the world was going to ask if he cheated, especially after his countrywoman Ruth Chepngetich got a 3-year doping ban in 2025. Adidas got out ahead of it. The shoe retails at $500 and is barely available. Adidas's Adizero shoes won half of all major marathon races in 2024. Yesterday in London, four of the top five finishers wore the same Adidas shoe. Yomif Kejelcha crossed the line 11 seconds after Sawe and also broke 2 hours. The top three runners all beat the previous world record. Nike's only response was an Instagram post. Three sentences long: "The clock has been reset. There is no finish line." That was their entire public reaction to losing a 10-year moonshot to their biggest rival.

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture. I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back. His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach. Here's the story almost nobody tells you. Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds. The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away. The decision quietly changed how the world learns math. For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb. Strang inverted the entire curriculum. He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood. His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct. The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room. For 62 years. The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet. Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos. His final lecture was in May 2023. The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out. His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right. That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management. The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home. 20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge. The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free. The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

@anishmoonka Superb Anish ji 👍🙏

When a computer tracks the Indian classical dancer in this video, it picks up perfect circles, triangles, and curves in every movement. There are exactly 108 of them. All 108 were written into a manual over 2,000 years ago. That manual is the Natya Shastra. Six thousand verses, written somewhere around 200 BCE. It describes 108 specific dance movements for Bharatanatyam, one of the oldest dance forms in India. Each movement spells out three things: where your hands go, what angle your body holds, and the exact path your legs trace. Roughly 150 step combinations grow out of those 108 base movements. A trained dancer spends years learning 70 to 80 of them. Watch the dancer's legs in the video. The bent-knee squat creates a diamond shape. Palms together make a triangle. When researchers plotted these positions in three dimensions this year, they found the moving body carves out twisted spirals and bowl-shaped curves, the kind of shapes you see in an engineering textbook, not a dance studio. Every limb holds a specific angle and moves a measured distance. The rhythm is math too. A 7-beat song gets filled with dance steps of 3 and 4. Scale that to 35 beats and the groups of 3 and 4 repeat five times. Choreographers work out these splits in their heads while performing live. All 108 movements are also carved into the stone walls of a 12th-century temple in Tamil Nadu called Chidambaram, many panels still carrying the original Sanskrit description next to them. A choreography textbook in granite, still legible after 900 years. A 2013 study put 25 people on a walkway rigged with motion-capture cameras. Every human stride has two parts: when your foot is on the ground and when it swings forward. The ratio between those two parts came out to 1.620. The golden ratio is 1.618. Your foot lifts off at 61.8% of every step you take, and it has done this your entire life. A Bharatanatyam dancer takes that same built-in proportion and amplifies it across 108 movements, each one tracing shapes that were set down in writing over 2,000 years before the tracking software in this video existed.