Dr. Ravi Chandra

It’s a special moment for both our families, Uday. I will never forget the moment when I met a freshly minted MBA who had decided to become an entrepreneur in financial services, and walked into my office to offer our company bill discounting facilities. From that small beginning in financial intermediation to becoming one of the most respected bankers in the world is nothing short of a magnificent and inspiring journey. There’s so much more ahead of you…. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

JS-Coordination wrote to Vedant today attaching his correct answer book and confirming that -The error was real. -The student was right. For all those who thought a young 12th class student was a ‘Pakistani’ - Govt of India doesn’t think so. CBSE has accepted the mistake and issued him his answer sheet.

@GabbbarSingh We did 72 hours journey in peak summers every year for five years in sleeper second class from college to home and home to college with stopover in Mumbai or Chennai. memories are amazing plus it gives you so much of life skills that no one can teach.

You will appreciate what life has to offer much better if you ever made a 36+ hr journey in 2nd class sleeper across India in peak summers. If by any chance you fall asleep, the seat sticks to your skin. You are forever short of water, the window is like a 21 inch hair dryer. You wish to splash your face with water for some respite, the water in the sink is boiling. The only respite is the guys moving around with buckets with icy water, with an assortment of cold drink bottle submerged in it, sold at the rate of an arm & a leg. You settle for a chilled Frooti. It tastes so godly that you write about it on Twitter 20 years later :)

Column: How train journeys train you for the real world. A trip down memory lane. Read, Share views :)

After 2 years using Claude, I can say it’s the technology that has revolutionized my life. Here are 15 prompts I use daily that have transformed my day to day; they could do the same for you: (Save this 🔖)

Every Bihari cares deeply about Brand Bihar, because Bihar is not just a state, it’s an emotion, it is our identity, our history, and our collective aspiration. It is truly an honour and privilege to contribute to this journey of shaping and strengthening Brand Bihar. I am deeply grateful to the Hon’ble Chief Minister and to the Chief Secretary Pratyaya Amrit for entrusting me with this opportunity to play a role. We hope to contribute meaningfully towards showcasing the real Bihar, its progress, potential, and aspirations to the world. Brand Bihar will truly succeed if all of us come together to participate in this, we would love to hear from everyone who wants to contribute. If you have ideas, suggestions, recommendations, wish to participate, collaborate, or contribute in any way towards building and strengthening Brand Bihar, please fill the link below and we will be in touch. bit.ly/42NEG6J

Remembering Rajiv Gandhi on the anniversary of his tragic death. He was one of the warmest, most decent human beings to become Prime Minister of India. With him, what you saw was what you got; there was no deviousness, no subterfuge & certainly, no megalomania. When he made mistakes he admitted it. When he felt he had been unfair to people he apologised. And despite growing up in a political family he never let the cynicism that characterises Indian politics get to him. We often forget that he may have been the first Indian PM to have ever held a regular job, to have paid income tax and PF. This gave him an understanding of how salaried people in India lived & how the system was tilted against them. During his time taxes were lowered,the stock market boomed and India prepared for the digital age. He went too soon. If he had lived he would have returned to power sooner rather than later. By the time he died, he had learned from the early mistakes that his inexperience led him to make & was ideally placed to lead India into the 21 st Century and to forge a society that had no room for divisiveness & hatred. As even his critics will concede, he was at heart a unifier, signing accords in Punjab, Assam & Mizoram, ending conflicts and building a better India.

@airindia thank you for hiring prolific liars. Flight AI 856 delayed by more than 3 hours, food served in garbage bags, as if we passengers are beggars to come to gate 3 and collect your snacks. I am sending my food package to you. Pls hand it over to your CEO

@airindia @vijaydubey26 @airindia Show some responsibility and own it up. Talking about the quality checks after serving meals in plastic bags reeks of arrogance and entitlement. Your post actually makes it worse. If nothing else, fire your copywriter. Your brand is better off without such response.

“You can do everything right and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

@GabbbarSingh Well articulated. Ghar ghar ki kahani in Patna . Going through the same situation

Check out more: farmersforforests.org

The heat has been brutal this past week. Temperatures hit 45° in Nagpur, 44° in Ahmedabad, 43° in Prayagraj, 42° in Delhi. Even Bengaluru hit 37°. And we're still in April 😬 A big contributing factor behind rising temperatures is the loss of forest cover, and India has lost a lot of it. Back in 2020, we met the team behind Farmers for Forests (F4F). Their idea was to do agroforestry at scale. The challenge is that farmers can't afford to wait years for trees to pay off, and most tree-planting projects don't survive the first monsoon. The idea was ambitious, and we at @RainmatterOrg backed them early. Most tree-planting in India is monoculture, just rows of one species. But a plantation isn't a forest. F4F plants multi-layer agroforests with fruit, timber, shrubs, intercrops, and native species, trying to mimic what an actual forest does. Six years later, they've gone from 50 acres to 5,000 acres and have just secured funding to reach 40,000 over the next three years. Compared to traditional crop farming, per acre, they're seeing ~4x carbon sequestration, ~3x farmer income, and meaningful improvement in biodiversity and soil health. Still early days, but promising. Those numbers needed to be verifiable. So F4F built TreeLens, an open-source tree-tracking system that uses drone imagery to measure carbon sequestration, tree height, and biodiversity across thousands of small farms. 15 other organisations now use it. The hardest problem in agroforestry is time. Fruit trees take 5 to 7 years to pay off, and most small farmers simply can't wait that long. So F4F is now working with the government and the larger ecosystem to design financial instruments like carbon bonds and first-loss guarantees that protect farmers while the trees grow. Really glad we backed Arti, Aditya, and Krutika early.

What Maharashtra is doing with Marathi is not just about language—it is about power, continuity, and economic design. When a society insists that its language be present in schools, administration, and everyday transactions, it is not being narrow; it is building a self-sustaining ecosystem of identity and opportunity. Though poor autowalas can not learn Marathi overnight, they should have given more time to learn basic marathi. Now contrast that with Bihar and UP. Across much of Bihar and UP, languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, and Magahi are slowly being pushed out of relevance. Not always by policy—but more dangerously, by mindset. Parents actively discourage their children from speaking their mother tongue. Schools don’t validate it. Administration ignores it. The market doesn’t reward it. And slowly, a generation grows up linguistically disconnected from its own soil. This is not modernization. This is erosion. Language is not just a tool of communication—it is a tool of cognition. When a child is forced to think, learn, and express only in an external language, they are not gaining intelligence; they are often losing depth. Research across education systems globally shows that foundational learning is strongest in the mother tongue. Strip that away, and you create individuals who may be fluent—but not rooted, not confident, not original. And that has direct economic consequences. Innovation rarely comes from imitation. It comes from a deep understanding of context—of people, culture, behavior. If Bihar’s and UP's future generations cannot fully access their own cultural logic because they’ve been distanced from their language, they will struggle to build solutions for their own society. They will remain dependent—on ideas, frameworks, and validation from outside. Look at regions that have retained linguistic pride—whether it’s Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, or even countries like Japan and France. Their local language is not a barrier to growth; it is the foundation of it. It allows local industries to flourish, local content markets to explode, and local talent to operate with confidence. Bihar and UP, on the other hand, risks becoming only a supplier of labor—not a creator of value. When your language disappears from business, you lose local markets. When it disappears from administration, you lose accessibility. When it disappears from education, you lose intellectual independence. And when it disappears from homes, you lose continuity. This is how economic dependency begins—not with lack of resources, but with loss of voice. There’s also a quieter damage happening. A child who grows up believing their mother tongue is “inferior” carries an invisible psychological weight. They learn to associate success with distancing themselves from their roots. Over time, this creates a fractured identity—people who are neither fully global nor comfortably local. That kind of internal conflict does not produce confident societies; it produces hesitant ones. And hesitant societies don’t build strong economies. If this trend continues, Bihar, UP won’t just lose its languages—it will lose its stories, its cultural industries, its originality, and eventually, its bargaining power in a competitive world. The irony is brutal: in trying to “move ahead,” we may be ensuring we never truly lead. The solution is not to reject Hindi or English. That would be equally limiting. The solution is balance—and more importantly, respect. Mother tongue must coexist as a foundation, not be treated as a liability. It should be present in early education, local governance, media, and business ecosystems. Because a language survives not when it is spoken occasionally—but when it is needed. And a society thrives not when it imitates others—but when it understands itself deeply enough to create its own path. Bihar and UP still has that chance. But not for long.

Here’s proof that we need better layouts.. This 2,912 sq ft home in Thalassery, Kerala, fits a full family program; four bedrooms, private courtyard, lily pond, well, kitchen garden; not by building bigger but by building around three distinct functional zones organized from a central axis. Exposed laterite walls. Clay tile roof. 35% of the wood and roof tiles salvaged from the old house that stood on the same site. Solar panels. Rainwater harvesting feeding the lily pond. Nothing imported that didn’t need to be. Nothing wasted that could be reused. Architects: TWO i Architects, Kannur, Kerala. Completed 2022. The house your community has always built was never the problem. It was the decision to stop refining it. More images in the comments 🧵

As the leading global voice on the environment, UNEP provides leadership and encourages partnership in addressing humanity’s most pressing environmental challenges. To achieve this, we regularly seek qualified professionals to join our team. See current vacancies here: unep.org/work-with-us

10 years of "Mithila Makhaan". 🙏

Every 6 seconds, we lose an area of tropical rainforest as big as a football pitch. Forests and trees make Earth livable. They are a critical defence against global heating. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is our shared commitment to prevent and reverse ecosystem degradation worldwide. decadeonrestoration.org