Surjit Bhalla

"There is now a self-critical, reappraising mood in the Persian Gulf capitals" about their ties with the US, which was an opportunity for India. You'd think this was written today. It was written in 1981.

India’s China Climbdown: In a move largely aimed at China, India today eased FDI rules for countries sharing land borders with it, reversing restrictions imposed in 2020 after New Delhi discovered stealth Chinese encroachments in eastern Ladakh. The step is the latest in a series of moves by the Modi government to normalize ties with China largely on Beijing’s terms, effectively dropping its earlier demand for a restoration of the pre-2020 territorial status quo. Although rival troops disengaged at some standoff points, the “buffer zones” created often lie on areas previously patrolled by India, effectively redefining the status quo to China’s advantage. India has also begun easing visa issuance for Chinese nationals. After a five-year hiatus triggered by multiple troop clashes in Ladakh, the two countries have resumed direct passenger flights. Meanwhile, India’s finance ministry has begun scrapping the 2020 restrictions that barred Chinese firms from bidding for Indian government contracts. Greater Chinese investment in sensitive sectors — from power grids to EV infrastructure — could give Beijing potential “kill switches” or new economic leverage over Indian policy. The irony is stark. After the 2020 encroachments, India sought to “decouple” from China. Instead, it now finds itself even more dependent on Chinese supply chains, allowing China’s bilateral trade surplus with India to keep surging — already exceeding India’s entire annual defense budget.

For decades, peer review has been treated as the gold standard of scientific validation. Yet many scientists know the reality: the system is far from perfect. Peer review is broken and sometimes even corrupted. The process can be slow, inconsistent, and vulnerable to bias. Reviewers are sometimes asked to judge work outside their true expertise. In other cases, they may be evaluating ideas that challenge the very paradigm in which they were trained. And occasionally, reviewers are simply competitors. Ironically, the most prestigious journals can also be the most conservative. Truly new ideas are often met with skepticism, while safer work that fits the current narrative moves more easily through the system. Increasingly, papers are judged less by the originality of the idea and more by the volume of data, the sophistication of statistics, and the beauty of the figures. Science risks becoming data-rich but idea-poor. But there is an important reality to remember: journals do not ultimately decide the impact of scientific work. Impact is decided later, by the community. By the scientists who read it, test it, debate it, and cite it. In the end, citations and ideas determine the legacy of a paper, not the impact factor of the journal that first published it. Science has always advanced by questioning assumptions. Perhaps it is time we also question the system that filters scientific ideas.

This is awful, but the situation among the plumbers is even worse: women represent only about 2.1% to 5.3% of the plumbing workforce in the U.S. and below 1% worldwide. Something has to be done with this glaring inequality!

lran has the highest female to male ratio in universities among all of the sovereign nations. More than 70% of students in engineering and pure sciences are women.

Sorry to say this, but SKY's answers in today's press conference were lame. Be your own man, don't try to be Rohit. Because Rohit is Rohit and he is not trying to be anyone else and that is why India sees him as one of us. Whether we win or lose the World Cup Final tommorrow, SKY as a captain needs to go. It is a travesty that Hardik is not India's Captain. P.S. GG too needs to go, regardless of the result. India's Test Team is in shambles, ODI team too is nowhere to being as great as it has the potential to be. T20 Team has such sheer individual brilliance that this very team, even without a Coach, would have made it to the Finals. GG works only with SKY, because SKY does not resist him at any point. Likes of Hardik, Rohit and Virat would have never been able to work under him.

Shaun Pollock slams third umpire over the wrong decision🎙; This was clearly not out !! Aiden markram should challenge the decision !! The ball clearly touched the ground first👍💯 This one decision will haunt south africa and the team forever...!!

Shaun Pollock slams third umpire over the wrong decision🎙; This was clearly not out !! Aiden markram should challenge the decision !! The ball clearly touched the ground first👍💯 This one decision will haunt south africa and the team forever...!!

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath just delivered the brutal truth parents and educators need to face: “Even in schools, it doesn’t matter what the size of the screen is… and it doesn’t matter who bought it… All of these things are going to hurt learning, which in turn are going to hurt our kids’ cognitive development.” His core warning: Gen Z is the first modern generation to be less cognitively capable than their parents — despite more years in school. Attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, even general IQ — all declining. The culprit isn’t school itself. It’s the widespread introduction of screens and digital tools for learning. Across 80 countries, once tech floods classrooms, performance drops sharply. Kids using computers ~5 hours/day for schoolwork score over 2/3 of a standard deviation lower than those who rarely touch tech. US NAEP data mirrors it: states adopt 1:1 devices → scores plateau, then fall. The biological reality: Humans evolved to learn deeply from other humans, not screens. Screens circumvent the natural mechanisms of attention, memory consolidation, and deep processing. When the tool fails to deliver, we don’t remove it — we redefine success to fit the tool (e.g., SAT reading comprehension reduced to skimming short sentences instead of deep passages). That’s not progress. That’s surrender. The cost is a generation losing cognitive sharpness at the exact moment the world needs them sharpest. Parents, teachers, policymakers: How much longer do we let screens dictate what “learning” looks like?

(1) Mass unemployment in India due to AI is mostly nonsense. Say's law says that supply creates its own demand. This is even more true for a young, rising EM which has lower adjustment costs and can relatively leapfrog. (2) That does not mean pain won't or can't be there. It does mean that to not proceed on digital autonomy due to fears of ITeS backlash gets it backward. As I have been saying, if/when this gets serious jobs will be (at least in a transitional frictional sense) yanked anyway. (3) Combining the above two, and keeping in mind all three demands of national security, democratic sovereignty, economic vitality - we must think hard and fast why should we be so dependent on US companies for basics such as email, chat, social media etc unless they are ready to form JVs, do local listings, share full algorithms (even X does not provide all of it.)

You've seen the OpenClaw hype and you don't want the struggle. That's why we're here.