Vikram Chandra

The Council of Ministers just met to consider Ease of Living and Ease of doing Business steps to revive the economy. The first big bang step should be serious thought on how to unclog the judicial system - and the government can easily take the lead by reducing its own litigation. *stop frivolous appeals and using the courts as a way to clear files. *a one time scheme that asks every department to close 50% of old matters that are clogging the legal system *An effective statute of limitations with government departments taking the lead in not asking for adjournments or the condoning of delays. *End process as punishment. Here are some great suggestions from one of India’s leading judicial minds Justice Sanjay Kishen Kaul on a recent episode of the India Story podcast. 👇🏼 Do share your own suggestions!

By all means run a bulldozer over Delhi Gymkhana. But don’t give the bullshit of exclusivity or privilege or tax payer money. If thats the standard we are living by then shut down Constitution Club; demolish the CSOI where govt land was given at throw away price to babus; shut down DSOI; take back all newspaper properties on BSZ Marg; Take back all lands given to NGOs which are profit centres; demolish IIC and Habitat Centre; stop subsidised food in parliament. MPs get paid so why should their food be subsidised? if they cant afford it, step down from parliament and do something that pays you enough. Shut down the Air Force and Army Golf Clubs, Santushti Centre, Race Club, and the Delhi Flying Club where no one flies anything. The DGC is being targeted because someone has an axe to grind and didnt get membership. Now its being made an elite vs non-elite fight which it isn't. But since we all want to play Bolshevik commies or are inspired by CCP and Khmer Rouge to demolish everything nice, decent, genteel, lets do a comprehensive job of it. Make it all a animal shelter which would warm the cockles of Pol Pot's heart. But please don’t give the BS of security because that is total hogwash. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

As I’ve said previously re Pakistan, the more you work with Trump, the greater the risk you’ll be asked to do something you don’t want to do-like join the Abraham Accords. An occupational hazard of being in his good graces. An awkward ask of Pak, but it shouldn’t be surprised.

Trump‘s latest post is going to detonate like a bombshell in Pakistan - and in countries like Saudi Arabia. He is demanding that those countries mandatorily sign the Abraham Accords - and hence fix their ties with Israel. Will Pakistan play ball? I’d love to see how the Field Marshal will sell this inside his country.

The most critical work on a site like this doesn’t stay visible for long. Cutting into rock, removing boulders, and altering the base of a hill - these are early-stage interventions. Once completed, they are often followed by surface-level activity that makes the site appear more controlled, more routine. That is where the narrative shifts. Today, the claim being made is that no hill cutting took place. But that claim is based only on what can be seen now - after the initial excavation has already been carried out. Because once the base has been cut and material removed, the visible signs reduce. The structural change does not. But the visuals speak for themselves - rock being cut, boulders being removed, and the slope being opened up. So the question is not whether it happened. It is why it is now being denied. Because the current state of the site is not neutral. It is the result of those earlier actions. And as the season changes and external stress on the land increases, what was done earlier becomes more relevant - not less. What may no longer be obvious on the surface still exists in the structure of the land. #SaveReisMagos #SaveGoa #ReisMagosGoa #Conservation @goafoundation @goaspeaksin @amche_goa @GoaWorthAFight

You will remember these tiger cubs @theRohitBansal! You met them too- when you were a toddler!

This picture in my father’s book “An Officer and a Tiger” is a photo of my sitting with 3 tiger cubs when I was an infant! One of the tiger cubs can be seen chomping my foot! 😃😅 @Rupa_Books

Just finished An Officer and a Tiger by Yogesh Chandra, a fascinating glimpse into India’s #forests, #wildlife battles, and #conservation. A compelling read for anyone who cares about the #Wild. Also, In the picture is renowned journalist @vikramchandra 😄 Gr8 read. @Rupa_Books

This isn't an India problem, every middle-income country has gone through this exact phase before us. Let me explain; Quick history. Here's what other countries looked like at our stage. > Japan in the 1970s. Tokyo had two-hour queues at parks on weekends. Bullet trains were so packed people had to be physically pushed in by station staff (the famous "oshiya"). Kyoto temples in cherry blossom season were unmanageable. Mount Fuji had garbage piling up because trails couldn't handle the foot traffic. > China in the early 2000s. The Great Wall had so many visitors that sections were closing for repair. Beijing parks were standing-room-only. Shanghai's Bund was a sea of humans every evening. The Forbidden City had hour-long entry lines. They started capping daily visitors only in 2014. > South Korea in the 1990s. Seoul's Han River parks were packed every weekend. Mountain trails to Bukhansan had traffic jams of hikers. Jeju Island hotels were impossible to book. They had the exact same complaints we have today. Even London in the 1960s and Paris in the 1970s went through this. Hyde Park used to be considered overcrowded with one tenth of today's London population. The Louvre had no crowd management. Eiffel Tower had no advance booking system. As, countries get richer, their middle class grows. More people can afford to travel and enjoy leisure. The country's infrastructure (built when only a small elite traveled) suddenly can't cope. There's a 15-20 year painful gap before infrastructure catches up. We're in year 12-13 of that gap. Now let's look at our growth; India added 25 crore people to the middle class in the last 15 years. Domestic tourism has tripled. Vehicle ownership doubled. But hotel inventory grew only 3-4% annually. Park space barely changed. Hill station capacity stayed roughly the same. India has roughly 2.5 lakh hotel rooms. The US has 50 lakh. China has 35 lakh. Even adjusting for tourism volumes, we're massively underbuilt. Mumbai has 1 sq metre of green space per person. London has 27. Singapore has 66. New York has 23. India has 22 popular hill stations that the entire middle class is squeezing into. We could easily have 50 if we developed Arunachal, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, parts of Himachal that nobody knows about. To improve the situation, both the government and the citizens need to step up. Let's look at what our government and policy makers must do first; > One. Open up the North-East seriously. The seven sisters and Sikkim could easily absorb 30-40% of current Himalayan tourist flow. The reason they don't is poor roads, inner-line permit complications for some states, weak hotel infrastructure, limited flights. All fixable in 5 years if treated as a national priority. > Two. Build new hill stations from scratch. Vietnam built Sa Pa into a major destination in 15 years. Malaysia did the same with Cameron Highlands. India has dozens of underdeveloped hill towns (Munsiyari, Chopta, Tawang, Ziro, Mawlynnong) that could become next-generation Shimla and Manali if infrastructure gets built. > Three. Cap visitors at fragile destinations. Bhutan does this brilliantly with their high-value tourism policy. Tirupati already does some version of this with time-slot darshan. Ladakh announced visitor caps in 2024. Manali, Mussoorie, Shimla, Rishikesh need the same. > Four. Distribute the load across the year. Right now everyone goes to the hills in May-June and December-January. School vacation timings, public holiday clustering, weather perception all push everyone to the same dates. Some of this can be solved with better government coordination on holidays. > Five. Build urban green space aggressively. Singapore's Park Connector Network. Tokyo's pocket parks every 500 metres. London's protected greenbelt. These are policy choices and we need to make ours. Now, let's look at what we, as citizens of this great country can do; > One. Travel off-peak. Avoid Diwali week in Goa. Avoid May in Manali. Avoid December in Kashmir. Push your travel by 2-3 weeks. The same place is 60% emptier and 30% cheaper. Two. > Skip the famous destinations. There are 7 lakh villages in India. We collectively visit maybe 200 of them. Skip Manali this year, try Chopta. Skip Goa, try Gokarna or Diu. Skip Shimla, try Tirthan Valley or Chamba. Skip Munnar, try Vagamon. The country is mostly empty if you look outside the Instagram circuit. > Three. Don't add to crowd-pulling content. Every viral reel of a "hidden gem" guarantees that place is destroyed in 6 months. Spiti was peaceful in 2018. Then 50 lakh reels happened. Now Spiti is the next Manali. If you find a quiet place, don't post the exact location. Be selfish about it. > Four. Carry your trash back. The single biggest visible damage at hill stations is plastic waste left behind. Manali and Leh look the way they do not because of crowds alone but because of crowds plus garbage. Take a bag. Bring it back full. Train your kids to do the same. > Five. Stop expecting hill stations to feel like 1995. They won't. Make peace with that. The five lakh people you're sharing Manali with are not the problem. The system that didn't build new infrastructure for them is the problem. > Six. Plan smarter. Book hotels 60-90 days ahead, not 5. Pre-book temple darshan slots. Avoid long weekends. Travel midweek where possible. We have terrible last-minute travel habits compared to Europeans or Japanese who plan months ahead. > Seven. The deeper mindset shift. Crowds in India don't mean India is broken. They mean India is finally working for more people than it used to. The poor family that couldn't afford to see Taj Mahal in 2005 is now seeing it in 2026. That family is sitting next to you in the auto, queuing next to you at the temple, breathing the same hill station air. That is genuinely a good thing for the country. The discomfort of more people in shared spaces is the price of those people no longer being too poor to participate in middle-class life. The fix is simply building more places to travel to. More hotels. More parks. More hill stations. More circuits. More infrastructure. That's slow, unglamorous work of the next 20 years. In the meantime, your part as a traveler is to spread the load, respect the place, plan ahead, and stop expecting the Indian experience to feel like a private experience just because you can afford it now. The country isn't crowded because something went wrong. It's crowded because something went right. We just need to build fast enough to match. It the same story that Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam all wrote before us. And eventually came out of. We will too. :)

Well done, Arjun. ❤️ Proud of the way you’ve carried yourself through this season, always believing in your ability, staying patient, working hard quietly, and remaining positive despite having to wait for your opportunity till the very last match. Cricket tests patience as much as skill, and you handled both beautifully today. Keep your feet on the ground, and continue being in love with the game like you always have. Love you always.👏

So India loses its visa- free status! India has been removed from Thailand’s general visa exemption (visa-free entry) list as part of a major policy overhaul approved by the Thai Cabinet on May 19, 2026. 54 countries which didn’t need visas earlier have retained their status but with a shortened duration of stay. But not India. Given the current exchange rate, this means Indians looking for a cheap trip, large families are likely to be hit. Those trying to game the system thinking it is a marker of cleverness, behaving obnoxiously, stingily, not following norms … you know why this happened.

we can be offended - but frankly it is time to have mandatory civic sense lessons for Indian tourists. I often cringe when I see the behaviour of some of compatriots. And not just in South East Asia. You should see what happens when our package tourists arrive in countries like Switzerland! 😢

Thais are one of the gentlest people in the world. They do not scream or shout or join issues and would much rather smile and move away. Indians love to haggle and often become aggressive in their tone and tenor. Massage service is almost sacred to them, whereas many Indians, would treat it as mode of cheap sexual enjoyment and would behave with girls in a rather demeaning manner. One would also hear of drunken brawls where Indians were involved. I guess this answers your question.

Indians need visas to enter Thailand again. Crazy move. As it is, with the drop in the value of the rupee Indians are rethinking foreign travel As Indian tourism to Thailand drops it is Thai businesses that will suffer. Indians will just go to Vietnam which is cheaper anyway

It was claimed that no hill cutting took place here. But the documented footage shows excavation equipment cutting into the hillside, removing rock and boulders, and altering the base of the slope. That matters because once the natural support structure of a hillside is disturbed, the consequences do not disappear simply because construction progresses or the site begins to look different. The risk created by that excavation remains. With the monsoon now almost here, that risk becomes significantly more serious. Heavy rainfall on a disturbed slope increases the likelihood of water infiltration, soil saturation, erosion, and slope instability. In Goa, this is not hypothetical. Landslides, road collapses, and slope failures are a recurring monsoon reality, particularly where terrain has already been weakened. The concern is straightforward: was adequate geotechnical assessment done before this level of excavation? Were the risks to surrounding structures, road access, and public safety properly accounted for? Because once heavy rain begins, the condition of the land will be tested under real pressure. What is frustrating is not just the risk. It is the denial of something that was visibly documented. Because when reality is denied while danger remains, public trust collapses long before the hillside does. #SaveReisMagos

NVIDIA, $NVDA, EARNINGS SUMMARY: 1. Record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, above expectations 2. Q1 adjusted EPS of $1.87, above expectations 3. Q2 revenue guidance of $89.2 billion to $92.8 billion, above expectations 4. New $80 billion share buyback authorization 5. Increase in dividend from $0.01/share to $0.25/share 6. Total revenue growth of +1,035% over the last 3 years Once again, Nvidia has crushed just about every expectation possible. The AI Revolution is on fire.

Going by the latest Nvidia blockbuster earnings - the AI boom is showing no sign of slowing down. 81 billion of dollars of revenue this quarter. Guiding to 91 billion in the next quarter! Without any sales to China in that guidance.

🇵🇰🇺🇸 Pakistan found a shortcut to Washington and it runs through the Trump family's wallet. After the cypher, after Khan, after the military flipped Pakistan's entire foreign policy, Munir needed to make sure the relationship stuck. So when Trump moved into crypto, Pakistan built an entire government body around it overnight. The Pakistan Crypto Council appeared almost overnight, and within weeks of its creation the Trump family's own firm World Liberty Financial had a delegation on a plane to Islamabad. That delegation was led by Zach Witkoff, son of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, and it landed in Islamabad with one agenda. By the end of the visit, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Munir both personally sitting in the room, Pakistan's Finance Minister had signed a deal committing to route a portion of Pakistan's annual remittances, somewhere between $36 to $38 billion a year, through the Trump family's own USD1 stablecoin. A deal that puts money directly through a firm the Trump family majority owns. It kept going. When rare earth supply chains became a hot topic in Washington, Pakistan announced a sweeping $500 million rare earths agreement with a Missouri based company. Beyond a symbolic first shipment, nothing commercial has actually moved under that deal. When Trump floated an international stabilization force for Gaza, Pakistan volunteered troops before anyone asked twice. The pattern is consistent. Every time Trump had a priority, Pakistan showed up with something to offer, crypto routes, rare earths, soldiers, whatever was needed to stay in the headlines and in Washington's good books. Pakistan promised much and delivered little. But the promises were always enough to keep Islamabad relevant. The cypher set all of this in motion. A government willing to put Trump family money ahead of its own national interest to keep the relationship alive. Source: Drop Site News

Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history. Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind. Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President. His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history: Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million. That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY. While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling. Now here's where it gets really insane: On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock. Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell." Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99. Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%. And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history. So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high And that's just ONE stock... The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta. He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia. He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise." Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date. He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense. He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker. He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions. Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't. His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades. The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed." But here's what independently managed looks like: Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high. Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips. Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake. Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform. Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades. Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million. Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter. While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks. This isn't a left or right issue. We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses. What do you think?

@Suparna_Singh @frammerai Haha come by any time! It will only cost you a cup of coffee. 😂

@vikramchandra @frammerai We miss ideating with you!

What a thrill to be among the 3 Indian start-ups selected to innovate with DeepMind experts at the Google for Startups Gemini Forum in the Bay Area. @frammerai