Benedict John

It was inspiring to watch the Artemis II launch yesterday — @NASA’s first crewed mission around the moon since 1972. Our space program has always captured an essential part of what it means to reach beyond what we thought was possible, and I hope the four brave astronauts on this mission will inspire a new generation to follow in their footsteps.

I am all for the credit given to Ian Bishop for the research he puts into the junior cricketers. But he's reading up and giving you stories written by reporters in the front lines who have travelled to the small venues, interviewed aspiring cricketers in locations around the country and really put in the hard yards. To not credit the likes of @PurnimaMalhotra, @pratyush93_raj, @captainshanky and so many others while acknowledging Bish's efforts in reading up on them from the stories written by these reporters is a bit surprising. Every one of these stories are being heard on air because a reporter went and chased it down. Please do give them the credit they deserve.

This is the post for those who aren’t aware about recent controversy on Instagram about an influencer called @lifeofpujaa, She is from a village in West Bengal who posts about movies, religion, feminism and capitalism while wearing a normal saree and in modest surroundings.  The drama started when so called privilege influencers specifically Niharika Jain and Otherwarya questioned her "authenticity." The claim? She’s an "industry plant." They found it suspicious that a "village girl" has such high-quality edits and a curated aesthetic.  Pujaa’s brand deals with Netflix etc, a rural woman being financially savvy and "too polished" for her background is a red flag. 🚩  This is seated classism and gatekeeping by these influencers and their coterie. The elite are just mad they no longer have a monopoly on intellectualism and they have birth right of global cinema, literature and culture. If you’re mad that a woman from rural setup having better film recommendations. maybe the problem isn't her "authenticity." Maybe it's your insecurity.

Loved how Ian Bishop effortlessly described the journey of Aniket Verma during his knock. 🙌 Losing mother at 3, his father remarried, he went to his Grandma’s house, how much sacrifice his uncle made for him, taking him to training regularly and all. This is what the Audience wants Hindi commentators to replicate. Have banter, it's fun but also educate the audience about the struggles of these rising stars. Kudos to Ian Bishop for his behind the seen researches. 👏

His name is R Thyagarajan. He built a Rs 1.5 lakh crore financial empire from scratch. He started by lending money to truck drivers nobody else would touch. In 2006 he transferred his entire personal stake worth Rs 6210 crore to his employees. Every rupee. Gone. Today he lives in a small house. Drives a car worth Rs 6 lakh. Does not own a mobile phone. He said phones are a distraction. In a world where billionaires buy yachts and islands Thyagarajan gave it all away and went back to work. This man built the Shriram Group. One of India’s largest financial conglomerates. Remember his name.

A riddle from 1688 goes: "If a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes,if given the ability, could he distinguish those objects by sight alone?" In 2003, the riddle was solved when five people had their sight restored through surgery. They could not.

2025 winners of the 4 big SF awards.

Jayaraj kept his mobile shop open past 9pm during lockdown. Police came. Took him away. His son Bennix heard about it and rushed to the station to check on his father. They let him in. Then locked the door. Both were stripped. Tied down on a wooden table. Beaten with lathis every 10 minutes through the night. Their blood splattered the walls. The next morning police took them to a doctor who gave them a fitness certificate. Then to a magistrate who remanded them to jail without even looking at them properly. Bennix died on June 22. Jayaraj died on June 23. Yesterday a court found all 9 police officers guilty of murder. It took 6 years. Sentencing is on March 30. The FIR said Jayaraj and Bennix rolled on the ground and used obscene language. CCTV from the shop next door showed nothing of that sort happened. The case against them was completely fabricated. They died for a crime they never committed.

A final-year law student, Rishi Kumar from Tamil Nadu National Law University, refuses to delete his blog criticising the Supreme Court… despite pressure from his own university. Why? Because the administration allegedly received calls from advocates, judges, and others claiming the post harms the institution’s “reputation.” The blog titled “The Supreme Court of India Has No Spine” questioned the court’s decision to ban an NCERT textbook chapter on judicial corruption. But here’s the real issue: A law student is being told to silence himself… for expressing a legal opinion. His response? Clear and powerful: “My opinions are mine… you do not own my voice or my conscience.” He even said he’s ready to face disciplinary action rather than back down. This isn’t just about one blog. This is about academic freedom vs institutional pressure. If law students… the future of the judiciary are discouraged from questioning the system, then who exactly is allowed to question it? Criticism of institutions ≠ disrespect. Silencing criticism = weakening democracy.

Dhurandhar 2 is a summary of 12 years of WhatsApp Forwards.

In 1870, a German chemist named Erich von Wolf was analysing the iron content of various vegetables. He made a decimal point error. He recorded spinach as containing 35mg of iron per 100g. The correct figure was 3.5mg. The misplaced decimal sat in the nutritional literature for decades, entirely unchallenged, because nobody particularly felt like re-testing spinach. In 1929, the Popeye comic strip launched. The creators cited the iron content of spinach as the scientific basis for their character's powers. By this point, the decimal point error was already sixty years old and fully embedded in received nutritional wisdom. The error was identified and corrected in 1937. The correction was not issued with anything approaching the cultural reach of the original claim. Popeye continued punching things. The actual iron content of spinach, 3.5mg per 100g, roughly where it was always supposed to be, is further complicated by the fact that spinach is among the highest-oxalate vegetables known. Oxalates bind to iron and calcium in the gut and remove them before absorption. The iron in spinach absorbs at around 1–2%, compared to 15–35% for haem iron from red meat. You would need to eat roughly a kilogram of spinach to absorb the iron equivalent of a 100g beef steak. There is also the kidney stone question. Spinach contains around 970mg of oxalates per 100g: one of the densest plant sources. Chronic high spinach consumption, particularly raw in daily smoothies, is a documented pathway to calcium oxalate kidney stones. The smoothie industry has not issued a correction. Popeye is still a sailor.

Bob Mueller was one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, transforming the bureau after 9/11 and saving countless lives. But it was his relentless commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our bedrock values that made him one of the most respected public servants of our time. Michelle and I send our condolences to Bob’s family, and everyone who knew and admired him.

This is a true story. A professor in India's premier educational engineering institution caught a student cheating in the exams and suspended him. Next day morning, the boys father who was a senior bureaucrat landed at his home and requested that the matter be forgotten and closed. When the requests and pleadings failed, The professor was warned of consequences. The academic that he was, the professor stuck to his guns. The harassment started. Within a week an income tax notice was served on him seeking details of his foreign travels. A few days later, police landed up investigating a house purchased by the professor in his home town. Later the income tax investigated the sources of funds for that home. In the process of scrutiny, they questioned a few more 'source of funds'. For a professor working in a remote corner of India, this was all too much. He contemplated giving it all up and taking another job. The notices, hearings, responses and harassment continued for about 20 months. Luckily the professor was clean. His foreign travel was official. The house was in a new housing society set up by a group of academics. The management was supportive. 'For 20 months, they robbed me of my sleep', says the professor. On prodding if he would take a similar stand again, he painfully says 'I doubt'! If you indeed want to fight corruption, the starting point has to be the source of corruption - the discretionary powers, arbitrariness and their abuse. It is rampant and completely normal. Remove the discretionary powers and 98% honest people will not worry of harassment when they do what is right! @suchetadalal This story is being retold. Our education ecosystem is subsumed by corruption. And it is normal too..

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

‘Booty’ and ‘butt’ are synonyms. ‘Call’ and ‘dial’ are synonyms. But, a ‘booty call’ and a ‘butt dial’ are VERY different things.

Some stories in cricket don't need a hundred Tests to matter. Swapnil Asnodkar played nine IPL games in 2008 and became a name nobody forgot. Picture this. A boy from Porvorim, barely 5 & a half feet, walks into a Rajasthan Royals camp with cost of less than a Mumbai apartment. Shane Warne looks at him. Sees something & calls him the Goan Cannon... The name stuck because it made no sense & perfect sense together. Goa has those old Portuguese cannons rusting near beaches. Small, Heavy, They still work. Asnodkar opened with Graeme Smith that year. Big man, little man. Smith would block & watch. Asnodkar would slash over point, whip through midwicket, make 60 off 34 balls in his first game like he had been doing this forever... He hadn't. He was a Ranji grafter until Warne & Smith told him to stop worrying about his wicket. Imagine spending 6 years learning to stay in, then someone says forget all that, hit everything. He did. Average of 34.5, Strike rate of 133.5. Average partnership of nearly 60 with Smith, highest among all teams. In the semifinal against attack of McGrath & Mohammad Asif, Asnodkar smashed 39 in just 21 balls & Royals scored 58 runs in powerplay itself. Royals went on to won the whole thing... Warne visited his house during a break. Ate prawns with the family. Brought Smith, Watson, even young Jadeja.. The greatest showman of this game sitting in a small Goan home, talking to a player's mother. Asnodkar still remembers that meal. Then 2009 happened. South Africa. Bouncy pitches. Fast bowlers who had watched his tapes. Short balls at his ribs. He averaged 12 that season. Injuries came & Form went. By 2011 he was sitting out. By 2018, Goa dropped him from the state side to give youngsters a chance... There's a photo somewhere of him & Dhoni talking. Shadab Jakati made the introduction. Dhoni wanted to know about Warne's methods. How did he make domestic players feel like equals? Asnodkar told him. That conversation probably helped Chennai Super Kings more than it helped Asnodkar... He is into coaching now, worked with Nagaland & Goa Under-23 sides. Holds a Level 2 certificate. Tried getting back into the IPL as a coach, but that hasn’t happened yet. But here's what counts. Every time a small town Indian player gets picked in the IPL, some of that started with Asnodkar. The template. The proof that you don't need to be from Mumbai or Delhi. You can be from anywhere. The cannon fired for one season. The echo never really stopped.

Sure, your eyes aren’t tricking you. That clip looks better than the new trailer, and the reason has nothing to do with talent. The VFX supervisor on Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014? Jerome Chen. The VFX supervisor on Brand New Day? Also Jerome Chen. Same person. Completely different system around him. In 2014, Chen had 50 effects artists at Sony Imageworks, the largest VFX crew the studio had ever put on a single project. They handled about 1,000 of the film’s 1,600 VFX shots on a $255 million budget. The crew shot on real film (not digital), on location in actual New York City, scanned Times Square with 36,000 photographs of over 100 billboards, and built physical lighting rigs on set so the CGI would match the real world. Now look at how Marvel makes Spider-Man movies. No Way Home had 2,500 VFX shots spread across 12 studios and about 3,000 artists. The budget was $200 million, $55 million less than TASM2 despite having 56% more VFX shots. Digital Domain, one of the VFX vendors, was delivering final shots days before the December 17, 2021, release. They kept reworking shots into mid-January, after the movie was already in theaters. Zoom out, and the math gets worse. Marvel released 6 films between 2008 and 2012. From 2023 to 2025, they pushed out 7 films and 7 TV shows. The Hollywood union representing VFX workers reported that Marvel pays artists about 20% below industry average and staffs one person where other studios hire three. Artists described 64-hour weeks and breakdowns on the job. Then, in February 2025, Technicolor, the parent company of MPC (three-time Oscar winner for Life of Pi, The Jungle Book, and 1917), collapsed almost overnight. 4,500 jobs gone globally. The studio had been actively working on Disney and Paramount films when the lights went out. Brand New Day has four months before release, and trailers routinely show unfinished shots. But the gap between a 2014 Spider-Man and a 2026 Spider-Man has nothing to do with technology going backwards. The industry has been asked to do three times the work for less money per shot while its biggest studios are going under.

@yvessirae She's a hero. And let's not forget to mention that her family faced cruel shaming from society, too. But they never stopped supporting her.

I don't use net banking apps on my phone because the mandatory permissions they ask for make no sense. Why does a banking app need access to my SMS, phone, contacts, etc., in the name of security, when not seeking invasive device permissions is, in fact, the global benchmark for cybersecurity. This is called the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). “Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you” has been at the heart of the Zerodha philosophy. This is exactly why we've built Zerodha the way we have. Kite asks for ZERO permissions on mobile, for instance, and this is one of the big reasons why millions of people trust us. What has enabled us is SEBI's mandatory strong two-factor authentication framework strike the right balance between security and privacy.

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