NS Ramnath

Before modern multinational banks reached Southeast Asia, merchants from 75 villages in Tamil Nadu had already built a transnational financial system. They financed rice in Burma, rubber in Malaya, retail in Singapore, plantations in Ceylon — connected not by contracts but by kinship and reputation. This is the story of the Chettiars.🧵

What is a completely useless piece of information that you will never forget for some reason?

Doesn’t get more OG Bangalorean than late night Lakeview. Hearing Rex/Plaza/Galaxy/Symphony makes me nostalgic for a simpler time. Increasingly, there’s a narrative of Bangalore that pervades X and claims to be the spirit of the city, whereas it is the complete anti-thesis of the Bangalore that I grew up in and with. This narrative is loud, boorish and aggressive in a way the city and its people never were. I yearn for the time when people were gentler and more easy-going. When help and kindness from strangers were a given. When there was an unspoken understanding of community and city. A safety net that only those of us grew up taking for granted can understand and now crave as we raise our own children in an increasingly alien and hostile environment. I wish there was a way to reclaim our city from being hijacked the way it is. A way to imbue that softness into this hard new shell that’s cocooning the city. Before it becomes unrecognisable. I just worry, if it’s perhaps not too late already.

A Bangalorean all my life. Never in over 4 decades have I been to MG Road or Brigade Road just to spend time during a weekend. If there is some work or errands towards that part, I may gone there for a meal. In younger days to Rex/Plaza/Galaxy/Symphony for a movie and ended up sending a while on MG Road or Brigade Road. The only exception would be going to Lakeview late night to eat ice cream. That too doesnt count as only going to MG Road.

for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was...not what I expected? 🧵

A non-Bangalorean's idea of a "Bangalorean". When I first arrived in Bangalore in 2006, I had a similar impression that people would be spending their weekends in "cool" places such as MG and Brigade road. So I asked a colleague who is from Bangalore, "Which place are you hanging out this weekend?" And he said, "My home. We have some relatives visiting us."

Unfortunately I can’t delete this app

“Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.” Respectfully Marc, but Marcus Aurelius wrote meditations 2000 years ago give or take a few years…

The healthiest habit in America is quietly destroying millions of knees. Walking 15,000+ steps a day builds your heart, your lungs, your endurance. It also loads the same five muscle groups in the same direction, 5.5 million repetitions per year, while the muscles responsible for keeping your knees from collapsing inward barely fire at all. Your body moves in three planes. Sagittal (forward and back), frontal (side to side), and transverse (rotation). Walking is almost entirely sagittal. Quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves: all getting hammered. Your adductors, the five muscles along your inner thigh, work in the frontal plane. They stabilize the pelvis, keep the knees tracking straight, and prevent the femur from drifting into varus alignment under load. During level walking, they activate at a fraction of their capacity. Along for the ride. Run that imbalance for a decade. The outer thigh gets progressively stronger. The inner thigh stays the same or atrophies. The knee joint, caught between two muscle groups pulling in opposite directions, starts absorbing asymmetric force with every single step. Cartilage wears unevenly. The medial compartment takes the hit first. This is how knee osteoarthritis develops. Knee OA now affects roughly 23% of the global adult population. In the US alone, surgeons perform nearly 800,000 total knee replacements per year at $30,000 to $50,000 each. That number is projected to hit 3.5 million annually by 2030. Patients with knee OA show 8 to 24% weaker hip abductor and adductor muscles compared to healthy controls. A longitudinal cohort study found that weaker hip muscles predicted faster OA progression. When the NHL gave players with weak adductors a 6-week strengthening program, injury rates dropped from 3.2 to 0.71 per 1,000 game exposures. 78% reduction from targeting one muscle group. The doctor telling this person’s dad to walk less is treating the symptom. The imbalance is the disease. Copenhagen planks, lateral lunges, side-lying adductions. Fifteen minutes, twice a week. That’s the difference between a $40,000 surgery and a body that can actually handle its own mileage.