Chetan Kulkarni

Not sure about the most powerful, but here is a list of my favourite scenes from movies... will keep adding to this as and when I recollect a favourite. (Thread)

The reason why the cockroach party has become so popular in a matter of days is not CIA but the suffocation of free expression in India. You cannot any longer be in mainstream entertainment or journalism, earn well and be free. India has become a Singapore minus the clean air. So any truly entertaining dissent (which activists normally are incapable of) becomes a huge relief for millions. This is not to say the Congress party was some beacon of freedom. I remember, under Congress rule, when Tavleen Singh came up with her saas-bahu memoirs she had kept the press launch very quiet for the fear of the Gandhis. Just that the Congress was such an inefficient organisation it was incompetent in administering even fear. But the BJP is good at this sort of a thing. Moral of the tweet is that if the BJP doesn't want real dissent it should allow some mainstream freedom of expression.

Same energy as this quote by Sir Humphrey. x.com/YesSirHumphrey…

@pastelsunset111 In psychology, projection is an unconscious defense mechanism where a person attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or motives onto someone else. No is threatened by compassion. Ppl are being threatened by abuses and flexing of political muscle.

@chetankulkarni Seems like you have a big void, some childhood trauma from bad parenting in your life... Deep rooted inferiority complex, hence you so threatened by compassion, like darkness afraid of Light. It reminds of your own short comings n shadows. Such hatred n venom in your little heart

This is so satisfying. Loved how she did not allow Maneka to get a word in. So no sanctimonious bullshit needed to be tolerated, no slura and insults from the so called dog lovers.

@PRaiLAC We have seen multiple videos and audio recordings of Maneka using choicest abuses on these hectoring phone calls to people whose children have been hurt by strays. Please feel free to admonish her about her upbringing and spare us your sanctimoniousness. x.com/_bababooks/sta…

If someone feels “satisfied” watching an elderly woman being disrespected, then something is seriously missing in their upbringing. Maneka Gandhi is older than you, a woman, and deserving of basic respect. Would you speak to your own mother this way? And unlike many people, she raises her voice for voiceless animals instead of killing innocent lives for pleasure or taste.

The problem is that the Government is neither willing to acknowledge the economic crisis nor ready to face difficult questions. Just listen to Indian Express Senior Associate Editor Udit Misra for 4 mins only.

Only from reading Putin's message, I came to know that more than 100 people have died due to heavy rains in Uttar Pradesh. Why our media did not cover this national calamity? We are coming to know only from Russian President as to what is happening in Uttar Pradesh.

Returning to India is a very personal decision, mostly governed by how your spouse aligns with the thought process, what your family's opinion is about education in India, & whether you think your kids can have a future here. The above holds veto power over love for India & MIGA.

@curiouswavefn @BookNoteApp I would also add "She has her mother's laugh". Learnt so many interesting and quirky tit bits about genes, evolution and biology in general from that one.

@BookNoteApp Superb list. I would add Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question”.

7 books to fall in love with biology: 1) The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas

@ksinamdar Someone should have gifted PuLa the kannauj made petrichor attar. There are a lot of videos on YouTube where they show how artisan perfumes from Kannuaj make the mitti ki khusboo wala attar. m.youtube.com/shorts/rdjG87p…

In Marathi it is called ‘Mridgandha’. Now you have same information in 3 languages. Now, some new useless information for the good folks on X. In rural Maharashtra, people call the first rains ‘Vāsāchā Pāus’, because the earth gives out a fragrance. Pu.La. Deshpande famously said that if that fragrance could be packed in a small bottle he would never use any other perfume. Poet Ashok Bagwe wrote a song on this ‘Vāsāchā Pāus’ which I composed music for. Here it is - youtu.be/RNfGJ4UB9Jw?si…

@WillmooreK_OK I count myself among the same set. Caste is like any other lens, free market, anti-Islam, race, feminism, hypermasculinity, once you wear those particular coloured glasses, reality hyper focuses on only those colours & even other coloured objects get tainted with the same colour.

@chetankulkarni For reasons that I don't understand, for Harsh and others, caste, from a facet of reality, has become article of faith.

Why this kind of a schtik never sticks is cos majority Indians' lived reality doesn't match with what folks like her proclaim to be true.

@WillmooreK_OK It is a testament to how extreme these arguments have become that a person who acknowledges caste discrimination, argues within closed circles about bending over backwards when tolerating extremist rhetoric from non-GCs finds it difficult to digest intelligent souding bullshit.

@chetankulkarni Never imagined you would be to right of Harsh Madhusudan 😂

The double slit experiment has haunted physicists for over 200 years. When you shoot a single photon through two slits in a barrier, it doesn't choose one hole. It goes through both simultaneously, interferes with itself, and lands on the screen as a wave pattern, as if the particle somehow knew both paths existed and took all of them at once. The moment you place a detector to watch which slit it goes through? The wave pattern vanishes. The photon suddenly behaves like a solid particle. The act of observation collapses the quantum superposition into a single definite reality. Physicists called this "wave-particle duality" and for generations, we treated it as a quirk of space. A particle's relationship with physical barriers, physical gaps, physical measurement. What just happened changes the entire frame. Researchers didn't use slits carved into a material. They used slits carved into time itself — ultra-short switching windows in the electrical properties of a material, flickering on and off at trillionths of a second. Light passed through these temporal gaps the way it would normally pass through spatial gaps. And the interference pattern still appeared. Not across space. Across frequency. Sit with that for a moment. The wave behavior of light, the phenomenon we always associated with light spreading through physical space, reproduced itself in the time dimension. The photon interfered with its own past and future states the way it normally interferes across left and right positions. What this quietly confirms is something theoretical physicists suspected but had never demonstrated: space and time are not just mathematically symmetric in quantum mechanics. They are physically interchangeable in ways that produce identical quantum behavior. The "slits" are interchangeable coordinates. The universe doesn't distinguish between a gap in space and a gap in time when it decides how reality should unfold. The implications of that sentence are almost impossible to absorb without stopping completely. We built our entire intuition about quantum mechanics around the geometry of space — particles passing through openings, waves spreading outward, interference happening across a physical screen. Every textbook, every lecture, every thought experiment uses spatial metaphors because that's the dimension we experience as "real" and navigable. Time, by contrast, we experience as a river we're trapped inside — always moving forward, never able to go sideways in it. We don't experience temporal gaps the way we experience physical ones. A door has two holes, you can walk through either one. A moment in time doesn't seem to have "holes." Except for a photon, apparently, it does. The temporal slit experiment forces a deeply uncomfortable update to how we model light, matter, and information. If wave-particle duality operates across time the same way it operates across space, it means quantum superposition — that strange state of "being in multiple states simultaneously until observed" — is not just a spatial phenomenon. A particle can exist in multiple temporal states simultaneously. Its wave function doesn't just spread left and right. It spreads forward and backward in time. This connects to something that's been sitting at the edge of quantum mechanics for decades: the block universe theory. In Einstein's relativity, past, present, and future all exist simultaneously as coordinates in a four-dimensional spacetime fabric. "Now" is just the slice of that fabric you happen to occupy. Physicists who take this seriously argue that the reason quantum mechanics is so strange is that particles already operate in the full four-dimensional block — they're not choosing a path through space, they're tracing a path through spacetime, and what we call "probability" is our limited three-dimensional perception failing to see the complete trajectory. The temporal slit experiment edges us closer to that picture being literally, physically, measurably true. And then there's the measurement problem. The original spatial double slit experiment breaks your brain because the act of looking destroys the wave behavior. Nobody has fully agreed on why. Some say the observer collapses the wave function. Some say the detector entangles with the photon and creates decoherence. Some say the universe splits. The temporal version of the experiment opens a new front in that war. When you measure a temporal slit — when you try to determine which moment the photon passed through — does the interference across frequency collapse the same way interference across space does when you watch it? That experiment hasn't been done yet. The answer will either confirm that time and space are truly symmetric at the quantum level, or it will break the symmetry and reveal that time has a fundamentally different relationship with observation than space does. Either outcome rewrites something important. We think of physics experiments as things that happen in laboratories, relevant to scientists with particle accelerators and cryogenic equipment. But every foundational shift in quantum mechanics eventually rewires technology. The photoelectric effect sounded like a curiosity in 1905. It built every solar panel and digital camera in existence. Quantum tunneling sounded abstract. It gave us the transistor, and therefore every computer. Wave-particle duality operating across time opens the door to temporal interference as an engineering tool. Controlling how light and matter interfere across time gaps — not space gaps — could produce entirely new forms of signal processing, photonic computing, and quantum communication that don't currently exist even theoretically. The universe keeps revealing that the constraints we assumed were fundamental were just the limits of our instruments. Time always looked like a wall. Turns out it was a slit all along.

For an introvert, there is nothing more intimidating than linguistic gatekeeping. In my time, they changed the pronunciation for "education" and "often" and looked at me with csuch ondescension when I pronunced the words with their correct pronunciation.

ये पानी आँख से ढलता है तो आँसू कहलता है लेकिन चेहरे पर चढ़ जाये तो रुबाब बन जाता है हां…कोई शर्म से पानी पानी हो जाता है... और कभी कभी यह पानी सरकारी फ्य्लो मैं अपने कुए समेत चोरी हो जाता है Nana Patekar in Thodasa Rumaani Ho Jaaye...

@avataram Had a feeling of deja vu about this thread. True enough... We had discussed the topic earlier where you had referenced a Tamil novel with Kanhoji Angre on the cover. x.com/chetankulkarni…

@avataram Yes. You can hire a small boat to take you to the Murud Janjira fort. It is a about a 10 minute boat ride to the fort.

Beautiful AI generated scene and discourse on mercy. Dostoyevsky is my favourite. Appropos, a line from one of the most famous poems in Hindi... क्षमा शोभती उस भुजंग को, जिसके पास गरल हो। उसको क्या, जो दंतहीन, विषरहित, विनीत, सरल हो।