Harihara Vinayakaram

Nirupama Menon started her career in 1973. The US engineered a false flag operation in Vietnam in 1965 and was still waging a brutal war against civilians in Vietnam even using chemical weapons (agent Orange). In 1971 (I assume she was in ICS training ) the US backed Pakistan in its genocide and threatened INDIA. While it's covert involvement in Chile began in the early 1960's by 1973 it was extremely clear to anyone who read a newspaper that the US was backing the brutal generals against Allende. He was in fact killed (or committed "suicide") in 1973. In 1975 the US govt itself revealed the horrific extent of the MKultra experiments. And we are only in the period 1973-75. The point here being, Nirupama as an experienced diplomat shouldn't even have thought of the US as this force of good. It never was. The last "just" war it fought was ww2.

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild. 5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals. The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today. The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century. People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable. 60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

I hate seeing this. But if Hinduism needs reform, we need to start by questioning what we blindly defend as “tradition.” Bathing in a sacred river is one thing. Bathing in a visibly filthy, polluted river and pretending it’s spiritually uplifting is another. Faith does not demand we ignore basic hygiene or common sense. Hinduism has survived for millennia because it adapts. It questioned ritualism. It reformed social evils. It evolves with time. It was never meant to be rigid or frozen like scriptural systems that treat change as heresy. Calling something “Sanatana” doesn’t make every practice untouchable. If a river is sacred, the dharmic act is to keep it clean; not defend the filth.

What’s a clear example of medical malpractice or unethical medical practice you’ve personally witnessed or experienced?

Alright. Imma do a mega thread on the Great Andy and his Nostradamus-level predictions. 1) Here is Andy solving India's budding currency crisis with just one opinion piece in Dec 2025. The deal with US happened in a few weeks.

I was wrong about Sarvam. When I wrote about them a year ago, I felt like the direction to train small "indic" language models was wrong. But boy, have they turned it around. They have the best text-to-speech, speech-to text, and OCR models for Indic languages, and that's actually really valuable. The pricing is very reasonable. And the website is not only beautifully designed but dirt easy to use. They're filling a well needed gap in the ecosystem and doing things big labs will probably never focus on to the fullest extent (at least in the short term). I don't know anything about the business, but there's a lot to appreciate about what they've build technologically and I can't remember the last time I felt that way about software products coming out of India. Well done.

In 1690s, if you were in Kashmir and wanted to procure a complete manuscript of Kashmiri recension of Mahabharata having ~1.1 lakhs shloka-s, what would be the price of it? We don't need to hypothesize because there is a recorded sale of such a manuscript from 1682.

Dear Carnatic Singers? Sincere question. What do you have against "Jagadaanandakaaraka"? Especially the "Aganitaguna Kanakachela" Charanam. Like why do every single one of you want to slaughter the words cutting them up in weird places? Does "Aganitagunakana-kachelasaala Vidalana-runa-basama-nacharana-paaramahimaatbhutasu..." make any sense to you? Or you dont care? (Aganitaguna Kanakachela Saalavidalana Arunaabhasamaanacharana apaaramahimaatbhuta Sukavijanahrutsadana Suramunigananihita Kalashaneeranidhijaaramana PaapagajaNrsimha Varatyaagaraajaadinuta)