Soham Das, CFA
21.9K posts
#WATCH | Hyderabad: On BRS MLAs and MLCs meeting the Governor of Telangana, Shiv Pratap Shukla, and submitting a formal complaint seeking an inquiry into the alleged illegal mining and land-grabbing activities of Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy, BRS MLC Dasoju Sravan says, "Unfortunately, the Telangana government and particularly Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy have turned out to be land grabbers...This is 27 acres of land... They conducted their Mandal survey in 2018 and built a massive compound around this entire land. Subsequently, they have done another survey under the direction of the High Court. A small portion of this land was acquired from these landowners by the HMDA (Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority)... These incidents amplify that they are the legitimate owners sitting on three survey numbers, 169, 244, and 245. Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy and his son run a company called Raghava Constructions... They came and said that we have a development agreement with the neighbouring landowners. We require your land... The moment they refused to give their land for the development, a new game was started by the revenue minister. His own assistant director initiated an AD survey, which was illegal, the High Court has condoned it, and put a stay on the entire survey...The hooligans tried to penetrate this land and then demolish the compound wall. When the landowners tried to file a complaint, the police did not help them. Today, under the leadership of our leader, KT Rama Rao and Harish Rao, some MLAs have come here to extend their solidarity to these victims... The police, revenue authorities and the minister all have colluded to encroach upon this land..."
The women of India and Pakistan need to deploy our ingrained common sense and suggest ways forward in our relationship. We need a women’s caucus. Not to throw accusations against each other but to think calmly and sensibly about the future ahead. For the sake of our children. We need to bring in the counterpoint: without naming it, without sounding defensive, but making it impossible to dismiss. For decades, India–Pakistan engagement has been trapped in a single script: territory, terror, recrimination. We repeat it with ritual precision, but it yields diminishing returns. What if we widened the frame? In West Asia, especially the Gulf, our interests often run in parallel: energy security, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, crisis response. These are not abstractions since they affect millions of lives and the resilience of both economies. Engaging here need not dilute our positions, create false parity, or reopen familiar disputes. It can remain tightly bounded, issue-specific, and without prejudice to core differences. Skeptics will argue that Pakistan cannot compartmentalise, that any engagement risks being instrumentalised, and that peripheral cooperation has never altered core hostility. But the purpose here is not transformation, it is insulation. Not to resolve the conflict by other means, but to prevent it from defining all means. Some may also say Pakistan has found a “role” in the Iran crisis and India should not be seen as seeking one. But this is not about visibility or mediation. Our interests are structural not transitory. If anything, the moment underscores a larger truth: even adversarial states operate beyond their disputes when interests demand it. When the central track is blocked, responsible statecraft does not stand still. It explores parallel ones, carefully, deliberately, and on its own terms. Sometimes, widening the field is not weakness. It is strategy. The women must speak.
The world is truly upside down! The Washington Post has published a brilliant article, written by, get this, a professor! To give you some flavor, here are a few choice lines by @jmurtazashvili: 1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe." 2) "What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests." 3) "Two weeks into the war, I watch otherwise reasonable analysts sprint to catastrophe. Former officials, thinktank scholars, credentialed professionals who are supposed to know how to read a conflict. Within days they had written the obituary: quagmire, overreach, disaster." 4) "The liberal internationalist left and the isolationist right — two camps that have agreed on almost nothing for decades — have suddenly found themselves in lockstep, racing to declare the war a failure before it had barely begun. This is the new blob: not the old foreign-policy establishment that the term originally described but a new amalgamation that has arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions. Together they are the most powerful engine of the alt-war." The truth. In the mainstream media. By a professor. And written well. Four things I thought I'd never see again in my lifetime.
Free public transport introduced in Australia to combat rising fuel costs trib.al/GaoiN8d
Thanks to Swiss voters, the referendum to introduce a 50% inheritance tax on fortunes above 50 million francs—aimed at funding the fight against “climate change” was rejected with 78% voting “No.”
Does this man look Chinese to you? This is an authenticated contemporary painting of Emperor Akbar At a Lit Festival yesterday, @authoramish said that it was absurd that we think Akbar looked like Prithviraj Kapoor. As per him, to our eyes, he would've appeared Mongolian or Chinese Also that his language wasn't Urdu but Turkish/Persian Nobody had asked him about this! He said it on his own as an example of the historical absurdities we believe... and repeated it about three times. According to him Akbar was Central Asian, looked nothing like an Indian Now I see this as a real problem when we've left history in the hands of so called history narrators instead of history scholars, because make no mistake, it is a scholarly discipline If Mr Tripathi had done even a bit of research on either history or geography he would have come to know that while Akbar's court language was Persian, by his generation, the spoken language in the royal household was close to what is now Brij Bhasha & Haryanvi - what later evolved into Hindustani. Akbar incidentally also was very interested in Sanskrit and Sanskrit texts. Of course, he was famously illiterate so could not read/write in any language Back to geography and Prithviraj Kapoor. Mr Kapoor was born in Peshawar probably in the same mohalla my grandmother (my parents are both Peshawar born) If only Tripathi had picked up a map of Asia, he would have found that even Babar's birthplace is only about 700 km from Peshawar - about 30% less than the distance between say, Delhi and Patna. The world is, surprise surprise, a continuum where faces don't magically transform at borders of modern nation states. That is why many in Mumbai persistently mistake me for a Parsi or Irani. Or why Prithviraj's son had blue eyes 😊 The burden of Mr Tripathi's song was that all history is biased with an unstated corollary that therefore any made up version of history is as good or valid as an academic's This is a dangerous slope in any field History ultimately has to be based on original (preferably contemporary) accounts if available, as well as other sources like archaeology, architecture, sculpture etc A close friend of mine, a world renowned business strategy professor, once said to me, "I've more in common with a Ph D in History or Physics than I have with a management practitioner. My mindset is that of an academic". He has the discipline of researching everything from original research papers so much so that during Covid all of us in the batch gave up trying to keep up with the fast changing medical research & delegated it entirely to him to read the papers properly and advise us on the latest research, along with the caveats That is the discipline of #academics! This whole thinking that no rigor is required to start spouting your version of history or anything else at all makes me wince Even assuming earlier #history writings are biased they've to be refuted by proper #research, not made up stories!
7 newly built Airports in Uttar Pradesh are almost shut down due to no passengers & no regular commercial flights, only VIP planes land their And Modi G inaugurated one more Airport in UP yesterday 😵💫
Ghare-Baire Director: Satyajit Ray
