Rams

@georgysthomas No I meant Mahendragiri. The book explains this issue in detail.

@rams So, initially there was a propulsion complex selected at TVM. That's what I was told. If you say the Kulasekharapatnam launch site was selected due to location advantages it's understandable.

A retired ISRO official who now works for Kerala govt told me that the trigger for every ISRO unit which exists outside of TVM was indifference by the state. Specifically, the Propulsion Complex at Mahendragiri happened due to resistance from locals who feared "sound pollution".

@georgysthomas AFAIK, it was chosen for it's location and faced some initial resistance due to environmental reasons.

@rams What does it say?

@dmuthuk What you are saying is correct w.r.t. Service cos. But it can be done over a decade or two, if you have high quality product companies based in Chennai. Since that is unlikely to happen, I guess you are entirely correct. 😢

To be candid, it is very difficult for any other city or state to overtake Bengaluru in software. The lead the city has built is enormous. A well entrenched ecosystem simply grows stronger.

@RohitChan666 x.com/rams/status/20…

@hindu_in_middle @Chellaney By contrast the only help spacex got from NASA was project sanction which was substantial, but spacex developed their rockets on their own. A hell of a llot of babysitting and handholding must have been done by ISRO. Hope they get paid fairly.

@Chellaney This is privatisation of profit where skills developed by public money in ISRO are handed over to few in skyroot No other explanation for successful Launch in first go

Today's successful launch of Vikram-1 by an Indian private company, Skyroot Aerospace, is a watershed moment because it achieved what is exceptionally rare in the space launch industry: a successful orbital mission on its very first attempt. Most new rockets suffer failures or major anomalies during maiden flights, making Skyroot's flawless insertion of payloads into a 450-km orbit a remarkable demonstration of engineering maturity, rigorous testing and execution. The achievement also validates India's 2020 space-sector reforms, which opened ISRO's infrastructure to private firms, proving that Indian startups can independently design, build and launch orbital-class rockets. Beyond establishing Skyroot as a serious competitor in the fast-growing global small-satellite launch market, the achievement makes India one of just three countries where a private company has successfully placed satellites in orbit.

@Fintech03 Unfortunately the atmospheric physics division @ P.R.L. has not really lived upto the high standards set by him.

To his neighbors in Poona & Ahmedabad, he was the ultimate, predictable clock-puncher, a mild-mannered weather officer obsessed with reading rainfall meters, logging barometric pressure & staring into the sky. But in reality, he was an intellectual giant who laid the physical foundations for modern atmospheric physics & satellite climate mapping. In the blistering summer of 1923, inside a cramped lab at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta, a young researcher named Kalpathi Ramakrishna Ramanathan was conducting a grueling experiment. He was C.V. Raman's doctoral student, tasked with studying how light scatters through highly purified liquids. Ramanathan passed a powerful beam of sunlight through water & carefully observed it. According to the classical laws of physics at the time, the scattered light should have retained its original color perfectly. Instead, Ramanathan noticed a faint, ghostly anomaly: a tiny fraction of the light emerged with a completely shifted color. He meticulously logged this "weak fluorescence" in his lab notebook. 5 yrs later, C.V. Raman formalized this exact physical anomaly into the globally acclaimed Raman Effect, which won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. While the world celebrated the master, Ramanathan quietly packed his bags, completely content to stay out of the spotlight. He was not interested in chasing titles in optical physics; his eyes were fixed much higher on the very edge of Earth’s atmosphere. In 1925, Ramanathan joined the India Meteorological Department in Simla, later moving to Poona. At the time, global meteorology was completely dominated by European frameworks. Western scientists firmly believed that the earth's atmosphere behaved uniformly: the closer you got to the equator, the warmer the upper atmosphere should be due to intense solar heating. Ramanathan realized the British were calculating from an incomplete deck. Operating with an incredibly tight budget, he engineered a series of high-altitude weather balloon experiments. He designed lightweight, sensitive barographs & thermographs, releasing them into the stratosphere over Agra & Poona. When the balloons floated back down & Ramanathan decoded the paper rolls, the data was shocking. He discovered that the tropopause, the boundary layer separating the lower atmosphere from the stratosphere was vastly different over India than over Europe. In fact, his data proved a complete paradox: the lowest, coldest temperatures in the entire upper atmosphere did not occur at the icy poles, but directly over the scorching equator. He proved that the tropical tropopause was pushed much higher into the sky (around 17 KMs up) by intense convective currents, causing the air at that extreme altitude to expand & cool to a freezing -80 degrees C, far colder than the stratosphere over London/Paris. His seminal 1929 paper completely shattered Eurocentric meteorological models, forcing the global scientific community to rewrite the physics of global air circulation. As the 1930s progressed, Ramanathan became quietly obsessed with an invisible, largely unmapped gas: ozone. Long before the phrase ozone layer/ozone hole entered the public lexicon, he realized that this thin molecular shield in the upper stratosphere was the primary regulator of solar energy hitting the planet. He acquired 1 of the earliest models of the Dobson Spectrophotometer, a highly complex instrument used to measure the total amount of atmospheric ozone by analyzing UV light. Instead of just taking casual readings, Ramanathan transformed India into a global powerhouse for ozone research. He set up a meticulous network of stations across the subcontinent, tracking how ozone levels fluctuated with the changing monsoons, solar cycles & latitude variations. His calculations were so remarkably precise that he discovered the global link b/w atmospheric ozone distribution & planetary wind systems. He became the absolute global authority on the subject, eventually being elected as the President of the International Ozone Commission in 1954. When India achieved independence, Vikram Sarabhai, the visionary father of the Indian space program realized he needed a master technician to build the country’s foundational space science infrastructure. He turned directly to the aging weather officer. In 1948, Ramanathan became the very 1st Director of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad. He established the core labs for cosmic ray research, ionospheric physics & aeronomy. He was the invisible, steady grandfather figure sitting at a desk in Ahmedabad, ensuring that when India finally launched its 1st satellites decades later, the country possessed the exact mathematical models of the upper atmosphere needed to navigate them safely. He lived until the age of 91, working at his desk as a prof emeritus until his very last days. His neighbors saw an elderly gentleman walking home in simple attire, entirely unaware that the global science of the skies was built on the calculations he carried inside his head.

@CranksCorner Tangential: Very interesting discussion about traditional Tamil pann influence on carnatic music by odhuvars: youtube.com/watch?v=DmucbO…

Wrote a long-form piece on the remarkable tradition of Odhuvars. Imagine when an Odhuvar sings, he's repeating a precise sonic frequency that has been sounded in that exact spot, across twenty to thirty generations of human life, without interruption. swarajyamag.com/culture/sanskr…

@ggganeshh Most of North India is like this

In our homes, a small crack in the external plaster causes the paint to flake badly. A lot of times, it also gives us an electrical shock too. Fungus develops on internal walls causing respiratory issues. How can people live safely here, especially with kids and elders around?

@sumanthraman Sir, how to pronounce this gentleman's last name. TIL Tiphan is not correct.

Henry Tiphagne praising the Vijay Govt for quick action is quite something... 👍👍

The Nehru mama difference ...

@dagalti Sobers pathi oru AI post போட்டா ellaam seriya poyidum

I have no opinions on cricketers I’ve not watched in real time Forget Sobers Not even Richards or Rohit Sharma My cricket-watching career largely starts with and ends in, the Sachin era. Unlike arts, for sports - you should have been there.

@bhatnaturally Many parts of Bangalore get Cauvery water - makes a big difference to the taste.

Sometimes I crave for good filter kaapi at a restaurant after my morning walk. Bangalore darshinis kaapi is way better than options in Udupi. Why is that?

@avataram Not sure if Bangalore architects and designers called to design homes in Chennai. A relative from Bangalore is known to design homes with minimum no of doors - not at all sure if mid folks would like it in Chennai. Very pleasant looking homes.

@cvkrishnan x.com/rams/status/20…

How to get this guy out of your feed?!!

@RaoSumukh Cauvery water, the big difference?

It's so ironic that all the udupi hotels in bangalore have such brilliant coffee but coffee in udupi is just sugar water.

Pragg is sponsored by Adani, a Jain!

@narayananh there used to lot of discussions about this courier at one time on twitter. Looks like nothing has changed. Many times I have gone to their office near cancer hospital to collect my package out of sheer desperation.

@rams They need to be called out.

Hey @BlueDart_ @BlueDartCares, I was at home yesterday, and I am at home today, but your delivery person is falsely reporting “consignee not available” without attempting to call me or come to the house. What can we do about this?

Someone here made a sharp observation about Seemar trying to fold Murugan into a ancestor worship tradition. More Satvik versions of Murugan worship are not bothered about what the rajasic and tamasic ones do, but the reverse is not true.