Quick notes: Tulsi 2020, Loan mela...

• Tulsi Gabbard For President?: ‘I Am Seriously Considering It’



• Loan Mela: The new governments will have to spend more than Rs 220 billion in Rajasthan, more than Rs 160 billion in MP, and nearly Rs 30 billion in Chhattisgarh to keep the promise.

The *political cost* of keeping BJP away from power by promising 'impossible' dreams and creating 'unsustainable' coalitions should soon play out, whether in Karnataka or Madhya Pradesh, one needs to have patience to wait out for it

— Dr Praveen Patil (@5Forty3) December 12, 2018


Modi seen forgiving farm loans as he seeks to win back rural voters.



• Land of the pure: The TRS will hike reservation for minorities from the current 7% to 12% in education and jobs.



• Vikas Gando Thayo Che:

We saw industry after industry violating every pollution control norm - this sort of growth they said, nobody wants, when locals cannot get clean air or clean water. Every river we crossed was a dry bed and often the river bed was being drained of water by mafia https://t.co/YmOxXCVdma

— viva kermani (@vivakermani) December 11, 2018




• Mobility: Mahindra Electric is betting big on e-rickshaws



• “Ancient Modalities”: Meditation is the fastest growing wellness activity in the US



• Tao Te Ching: “Clay is made into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness that use depends. The door and windows are cut out to form a house; but it is on empty space, that its use depends. It is the empty space in the room that gives its function. Everything is shaped by nothing”.



• The Extraordinary Life of Maurice Frydman: Virtually nothing is known about this most extraordinary man. He was in all the right places in all the right times to get the maximum benefit of interaction with some of the greats of Indian spirituality -- Sri Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Mahatma Gandhi and J. Krishnamurti… He was a Gandhian, he worked for the uplift of the poor in India, he worked with Tibetan refugees, he edited extraordinary books [like] “I am That,” probably one of the all time spiritual classics. Ramana Maharshi said of Frydman “He belongs only here to India. Somehow he was born abroad, but has come again here”.
  
  “We ripen when we refuse to drift, when striving ceaselessly become a way of life, when dispassion born of insight becomes spontaneous. When the search ‘Who Am I?’ becomes the only thing that matters, when we become a mere torch and the flame all important, it will mean that we are ripening fast. We cannot accelerate that ripening, but we can remove the obstacles of fear and greed, indolence and fancy, prejudice and pride.” Maurice Frydman, April 1976 The Mountain Path