Lavanya 🎙️🎥👩🏻‍💻

🧿 PUBLISHED IN THE WISDEN ALMANACK! Growing up, the Almanack was such a fascinating piece of literature. Loved skimming through the documented tussles in world cricket in the library at school which eventually evolved into following individual authors online as an adult. Feels a bit surreal to see my name in a list stacked with such giants of industry. Hopefully the first of more such opportunities. ❤ I got to document South Africa's tour of India in 2024. A remarkably wholesome series with both teams ironing out issues ahead of a World Cup. It also involved a one-off Test which saw plenty of grit on display. (Happy to link references to longer pieces i did for Sportstar for context if interested). BIG thank you to @BoothCricket and the @WisdenAlmanack team for the opportunity. Another big thank you and a hug to @ghosh_annesha for opening doors (There's a stellar Smriti Mandhana profile penned by AG you NEED to read. Link available on her profile) 🙌

The last para hits the nail on the head ⁦@DeccanHerald⁩ #IPL

Ok last thoughts about the lifeofpujaa thing and I can’t fully articulate why it’s still bothering me except that I think it’s because it was so fast! The shift! Like one minute people were sharing her videos and feeling genuinely good about it and the next there were these questions like is this authentic, is someone writing her captions, is she really like this, how can she be like this if she’s a poor villager and I kept waiting for someone to notice that those questions only arrived the moment she started making money. Cui bono is a Latin term that means who benefits, and it’s what you ask when you’re trying to find a suspect. The simplest way to do so is to follow the advantage. When she was just the woman from the village doing sharp cultural critique in English nobody expected, everyone benefited except her. We got the content, we got to feel like we’d found something real, we got to share it and be the person who shares things like that, we got to feel good about ‘uplifting someone’, we got to feel smug about our intersectionality. She got to be…….inspiring. Which, okay? But inspiring is not a benefit. And I think what actually made people uncomfortable wasn’t the monetisation, it was that monetisation made the previous dynamic visible. Like suddenly it was obvious that there had been a transaction happening the whole time, that her being real on the internet was something people were consuming and gaining from, and the only reason it felt pure before was because she wasn’t getting anything out of it. The moment she tried to, the whole thing felt, I don’t know? Compromised somehow? This is what the ‘inspirational woman label’ does, right? It celebrates you exactly as long as you’re not benefiting from the celebration. You’re allowed to be remarkable but not paid for it. You’re allowed to be discovered but not to monetise the discovery. You’re allowed to be real and raw and unfiltered as long as real and raw and unfiltered stays free. The moment you try to convert attention into agency you’ve violated an unspoken contract that you never really signed up for? So cui bono. Who benefits from the inspirational woman? Everyone who watched the videos and felt something and shared them and went about their day. The moment she tried to collect even a small part of it back, we called it a betrayal. Which is an extraordinary thing to call someone deciding they’d like to be paid. The next time someone calls a woman inspirational, maybe ask what she’s getting out of it. And if the answer is nothing, maybe ask what you are getting instead.

Louis Theroux's documentary #InsideTheManosphere is incredibly revealing. So much of it is what we know, but that brazenness being called out in real time and with receipts needed to be done. Well done.

"With a fellow athlete?" 🤦‍♀️ Captain of the Indian men's hockey team

Justice Asha Menon-led committee has raised concerns over removal of self-identification rights and privacy-related provisions in the new law. Everyone needs to know 👇 barandbench.com/news/supreme-c…

My tribute to the late S Thyagarajan, the formidable hockey writer across decades, in today’s @mid_day

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to know more from the Mossad agents about the sexual activities of US president Bill Clinton soon after her husband was first elected as the prime minister of Israel. That was 30 years ago #GideonsSpies

Religion. Has killed more humans than all infections combined. Infections have vaccines though. A vaccine for religion is rationalism and humanism, which seems to be rare these days and awaiting rediscovery.

I am old enough to remember that Israel carried out a terrorist beeper attack in Lebanon against children and civilians and faces no international condemnation or sanctions.

How instrumental has Netanyahu been in dragging the US into war with Iran? 🤔 @amanpour has the answer...

What’s even more worrying is the Mallu Omertà code of silence that protected Bose and prevented this story from coming out before Vandana Kalra broke it

This cover image and a great piece by @OsmanSamiuddin which got picked up by the @guardian really go hand in hand. Great piece. Read here 👉 theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…

Any public comments against the trans bill made by the first openly queer MP in the Rajya Sabha? Couldn’t find it online - thought I’d check here.

I have officially resigned as the Southern States Representative of the National Council for Transgender Persons (NCTP). The Ministry passed the #TransgenderAmendmentBill2026 without consulting the Council. I cannot hold a seat where our voices are silenced. I stand with my community. 🏳️‍⚧️ #NCTP #KalkiSubramaniam #TransRightsAreHumanRights #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs #RejectTransAmendmentBill2026

Not a fan, but big relate.

Sally Rooney on Mo Salah. From The Guardian in 2017.

Now this is quality content. 😂😂

Not drawing any comparisons with the behemoths of world cricket, but what stands out in the Sky Cricket podcasts featuring Rob Key — including the latest episode — is the honesty and integrity with which the conversation unfolds.Despite the discussion taking place on the host broadcaster, Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain continue to grill Key without pulling punches. And Key, in turn, remains equally forthright. It doesn’t seem to matter that he is interacting with two former England captains — including the one under whom he made his Test debut. Key stays true to his role as one of the top decision-makers in English cricket, offering candid responses without retreating into safe, rehearsed lines. In an era of guarded interactions and carefully curated soundbites, that kind of openness makes for compelling listening @Athersmike @nassercricket @robkey79 @SkyCricket

Went down the rabbit hole on this. The dancing is the tamest part of the story. Marine biologist Amanda Vincent has spent decades studying seahorses, and what’s underneath that morning ritual goes way deeper than a cute video. The morning ritual lasts about 6 minutes. Both seahorses brighten their skin, link tails, and pirouette around a shared piece of coral or seagrass. Researchers call it “the carousel dance.” But it has a specific biological function: it synchronizes their reproductive cycles so the female’s eggs are ready the exact moment the male’s brood pouch is empty. That timing matters because the male can’t accept new eggs while he’s already pregnant. The male gets pregnant. The female transfers her eggs into his pouch through an organ called an ovipositor (a tube for depositing eggs). The whole transfer takes about 6 seconds. His pouch seals shut immediately. Inside, he grows a network of blood vessels that works almost exactly like a human placenta, delivering oxygen and nutrients to up to 1,000 developing embryos. Research from the University of Sydney, published in the journal Placenta, found the pouch wall thins and builds new blood vessels during pregnancy in ways that closely mirror what happens in a mammalian uterus. He gives birth using skeletal muscles, not smooth muscles like in mammalian labor. That means he has conscious control over the process. Labor can take hours. And within hours of delivering up to 1,000 fully formed babies, he’s ready to mate again. The female already has her next batch of eggs prepared, sometimes the same day. Less than 0.5% of those babies survive to adulthood. Fewer than 5 out of every 1,000. No parental care after birth. They get swept into ocean currents, eaten by crabs, or starve before they find food. That survival rate is why the morning dance matters so much. Every lost mating cycle is hundreds of offspring that never existed. The monogamy is extraordinary for a fish. Only about 3% of mammals form lasting partnerships. For fish, it’s rarer still. But in species like the Australian H. whitei, pairs are genetically monogamous across multiple breeding seasons. They greet each other every morning and ignore other seahorses entirely. The bond only breaks when one partner disappears. Amanda Vincent once watched a female keep visiting a male whose brood pouch had been punctured by a predator, making pregnancy impossible. She showed up every morning for weeks until his pouch healed. Then they remated. About 150 million seahorses are pulled from the ocean every year for traditional medicine and the pet trade. Most pet seahorses don’t last six weeks. 14 of the 47 known species were only identified in this century, meaning we’re losing populations of animals we barely knew existed.