Hemant Thakkar

The weather balloon/meteorological balloon used to take this UAV to 1,16,000 ft was a 2000gm/2kg balloon (uninflated weight), manufactured in Pune, India by our company PAWAN Rubber Products (pawanrubber.com) Very happy and proud to be associated with @kalam_labs !

@mayurshetty01 @neeran Our company is Exporting since 1996. If this reddit post was from that era then it might be true

A reddit post on the ease of doing export business in India

@hdfcsec In reality neither are your fees lower nor are your features better.

@hemya Hi Hemant, we regret the inconvenience caused. Your feedback has been duly noted by our team for review and improvement. Thank you.

After losing market share to every Tom, Dick and Harry, and spending crores launching HDFC SKY, HDFC Securities is now calling existing customers telling them their brokerage has been reduced. They had perhaps the largest cohort of profitable customers for the longest time, as the largest private sector Bank in India. Then literally set fire to the market share by neither updating their website and app for a decade, nor moderating brokerage based on what was happening in the market. Do we really need to wonder why HDFC stock price is where it is?

Truth to tell, I was in two minds about writing this piece. A nation and a people laser-focused on their rise and confident of their place in the world should not get perturbed by barking dogs on the street. But I did. There's a reason. 🧵

Yeh kya banda hai yaar 😭😭😭

REPORTER : Was it announced beforehand that both Prime Ministers would be taking questions? HELLE (smiling) : No, no. I was well aware that it was a press briefing and that neither leader would be taking questions. 🤯

Masterclass in handling a troll. Great job @MEAIndia

When I was growing up, even radical Leftist historians in Bengal would not do PR for Aurangzeb. They explained him away as an aberration to the syncretic culture that Akbar put into place. My hardcore Marxist history teacher in class 10 said that Aurangzeb vs Dara Shikoh was a battle for the soul of India and religious bigotry won. And now, our liberal historians tell us that Aurangzeb was a pretty ok guy.

#Pohe manufactured at traditional factories all over kokan but more so around Pen or Roha have a fan following for its distinctive taste and is the raw material for so many simple recipies in Maharashtra: 1) Phodniche pohe variants - kande pohe, batata pohe, vangi pohe 2) Dahi pohe - plain, kharachi mirchi, fried sandgi mirchi flavoured, metkut flavoured 3) Dadpe pohe - with essential ingrediants, with oil/phodni/tadka 4) Tel tikhat pohe - with raw unheated oil and red chilli powder. 5) Kolache pohe - kokan speciality with tamarind/kokum juice Am not including various types of chiwda that can be made using nylon, dagdi pohe nor 'mirgunda' or pohe papad either! Any more pohe prep that can be added....pl do @nitinwelde

This is totally false. Not an iota of truth in this. There is no question of putting such restrictions on foreign travel. We remain committed to improving ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and ‘Ease of Living’ for our people.

Growing up in Pune, mango season was predominatly May. The rich enjoyed it starting April till early June. Mango meant either Hapus (Alphonso) - sold in wooden boxes holding 4-5 dozens or Paayri sold in करंडी or flexible bamboo containers that held two dozens. The Paayri was sweeter and tangier but Hapus undoubtedly the king. Valsad hapus from Gujarat and Madras Paayri that came from Karnataka were considered inferior to their Ratnagiri cousins. Devgad, then a part of Ratnagiri dist did not differentiate its separate identity. Most hapus from kokan went by the nomenclature - Ratnagiri hapus/paayri. Then there were गोटी or रायवळ varieties mainly from the Maval - inexpensive, affordable to all and rather fibrous and rustic in taste. Always eaten by sucking out the juice after softening the fruit. The totapuri made it appearance on handcarts in June - much cheaper in price but never a real fav of Pune residents. Was often sought by home makers for making mango jam due to its rather tough pulp. The totapuri was a bit notorious for housing wasp like insect inside its seed. The other varieties were only heard of never seen. They did not have a market here because by the time they made an appearance people already had their fill that too of the premium hapus and paayri varieties. It was really the Kokan, Mumbai and Pune who enjoyed Hapus and Paayri in abundance due to their availability. Other places even within Maharashtra received a rather limited supply if at all of the hapus and paayri since yield was limited and transportation was not easy.

@me_nobody4 @kripalamanna I ask them to give in writing that they won't send me messages on SMS or whatsapp. Then they shut up

@hemya @kripalamanna Every store doing same thing these days. Once I fought with lifestyle billing fellow ... Told him to just shut up and print the bill for me.

Hey Bob's Bar Bengaluru, why must customers key in their phone number and validate it via OTP before they can even place an order? A beer and a bite shouldn’t require surrendering personal data. The Government of India’s Department of Consumer Affairs has already advised businesses not to insist on mobile numbers as a mandatory precondition for sale or billing, and that such data should only be collected with express consent.

Now, because one was born in West Bengal, and even though one identifies as an Anglo-Bihari, people kept asking me before the election who was winning. And now they ask me why they won. So, here’s my honest take: Bengalis have a cultural, pronounced kalcharal, chip on their shoulders about their homeland to the point that the world is divided between probashi Bengalis and non-bashi Bengalis. Somehow, one of the hallmarks of that culture became ensuring that one never voted for the BJP, which is rather odd given that the BJP’s precursor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was founded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. In other words, Bengal spent decades looking at the BJP as a Hindi heartland import while quietly ignoring the small historical inconvenience that one of its founding fathers was a Bengali bhadralok. This is a little like discovering that the loudest DJ at a Punjabi wedding was trained in Santiniketan. My first brush with cancel culture came long before it was co-opted by the woke community. Having grown up in Chhapra, of Ara Heele Chhapra Heele fame, and the centrist’s Promised Land, Singapore, one wasn’t very familiar with Bengali bhadralok cancel culture, but one learned very early in life. As a nine-year-old, I was asked, “What’s your favourite Rabi Thakur poem?” My answer, that I had no clue who or what a Rabi Thakur was, Tagore’s non-anglicised name with some filial love thrown in, was immediately met with pierced looks and derisive stares at my parents, who were promptly berated for not raising their only child properly. That was the moment when my deracinated personage was cast out of Bengali heaven, and I realised that not venerating Tagore is the only cardinal sin that exists for people born either in “Ooest” Bengal, because the letter W doesn’t exist in the Bengali lexicon, or East Bengal. For some reason, Bengal’s politics wasn’t politics but an aesthetic choice, a moral declaration, a pronunciation test, and proof that despite the mendicity on display across the state one was still somehow superior to non-Bengali speakers. The bhadralok imagination had its own sacred trinity: Tagore for the soul, Marx for the conscience, and Ray for the camera angle. Everything else was suspect. Hindi cinema was too loud. Gujarati businessmen were too efficient. North Indian politics was too muscular. Voting for BJP was the gustatory equivalent of ordering paneer at Olypub. And yet, here we are. Now I don’t know why my fellow brethren are so upset. Will we have to stop listening to Rabindrasangeet? Eat paneer steaks at Olypub? Watch propaganda films instead of Satyajit Ray movies? Paint our buildings every year instead of leaving them unwashed like they survived from the Harappan era? Worship a different bearded deity instead of Tagore or Marx? Only time will tell. But this, perhaps, is why everyone is behaving as if the Hooghly has turned saffron overnight. The fear is not merely that Bengal has voted differently. The fear is that Bengal may have lost the one thing it treasured even more than Rabindrasangeet, mishti doi and the right to correct your pronunciation: the belief that it was too intellectually refined to vote like everyone else.

This is an excellent take-down of NRB aanteil intellectuals. Every line is true and I could almost see real people who act and speak like this. indiatoday.in/opinion/story/…

Looks tell one story. Passports tell another. A plot twist Heathrow didn't see coming. 😆

At one point India just vanishes from this graphic. IYKYK

Once feared lost from Assam’s river systems, the critically endangered gharial has been spotted in Kaziranga National Park. This remarkable sighting stands as powerful proof of the quiet success of sustained conservation efforts across the state’s forests, wetlands and rivers. A proud moment for Assam’s extraordinary biodiversity. #Gharial #Kaziranga #WildlifeConservation #Assam @moefcc @byadavbjp @CMOfficeAssam @himantabiswa @PIB_India @MIB_India

Greeting the new Chief Minister of West Bengal @SuvenduWB