Quick notes: Missile exports | Transcendental Meditation...

• Akash missile export: Govt to approach China-wary nations. Focus will be on high-value defence platforms to achieve target of $5-billion annual exports.. “The export version of Akash will be different from the system currently deployed with the Indian Armed Forces”.



• Exploiting the loopholes: Amazon, Flipkart are violating investment rules related to multi brand retailing.



• Jerry Seinfeld: Transcendental Meditation and weight training will 'solve just about anyone's life'. Seinfeld practices TM twice a day or “any time I feel like I’m dipping”... Oprah Winfrey, hedgefund billionaire Ray Dalio and even singer Lady Gaga are proponents of TM, and credit much of their success and productivity to the practice.



• Meet India's lower-caste Hindu priest:


• Crops grown in Bangalore high on toxic heavy metals: The 17 lakes in and around Bangalore have become part of the city's drainage system, into which flow untreated sewage and industrial effluents from garment factories, electroplating industries, distilleries and other small-scale but polluting units. "The heavy metals are absorbed by the crops along with other essential plant nutrients." Cadmium can be a carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor which can lead to fertility and reproductive issues in men and women while long-term exposure can lead to bone diseases.



• How to Build your Own LIGHTBOARD: Elisa Valkyria

Quick notes: Tourism bungle | Missing VCs

• India shot itself in the foot: Indian authorities demolished commercial tourist structures along the banks of Pangong Lake, citing violation of Wildlife Act. "Had these commercial set ups not been demolished, we could have easily detected Chinese intrusion into Pangong Tso area. Taking advantage of darkness, Chinese troops managed to enter eight kilometers inside Indian territory"..... "The govt decision to demolish the tourist structures had left more than 500 people jobless. Besides, tourism activities by these temporary tents were preventing the Chinese from staking claim on territory".



• Bharat: DRDO drone likely to be deployed in Ladakh. The drone can provide real-time video transmission and has advanced night vision capabilities.



• Indian VCs are missing: "Good start-ups are getting sold to foreign firms, Indian investors need to play greater role"



• App craze: TikTok may be gone but another ByteDance app is thriving in India. About 74% of those who downloaded the Resso app are from India.



• Who is a Brahmin?

Some people ("traditionalists") questioned my reading of those who didn't do Sandhya can't be considered Brahmin. But that is exactly what the Manusmriti states.

न तिष्ठति तु यः पूर्वां नौपास्ते यश्च पश्चिमाम् ।
स शूद्रवद् बहिष्कार्यः सर्वस्माद् द्विजकर्मणः ॥ २.१०३ ॥ pic.twitter.com/aWg9DLRqeh

— Sankrant Sanu सानु संक्रान्त ਸੰਕ੍ਰਾਂਤ ਸਾਨੁ (@sankrant) March 28, 2020

- - - - -


Actually Varna of a person is decided after completing of education not on the basis of birth. यज्ञोपवीत is a संस्कार to begin वेदाध्ययन. Vedas do not prohibit education to shudra but it says to teach vedas even to a shudra.

— Viśhāl | विशालः | விஷால் (@vedicvishal) July 7, 2020




• Feminists want patriarchy of Islamists: Swedish feminists have destroyed the patriarchy and with it the male dominance hierarchy. In doing this these same feminists forgot that most women's instinct is to mate up and across that hierarchy. So what happens when the dominance is gone? Women withdraw from men, marriage, and childbirth. But the feminists actually run Sweden now, and the instinctive need for the male dominance hierarchy hasn't gone away. So the feminists import hundred of thousands of men who regard feminism as dangerous nonsense, and who will restore the male dominance hierarchy the only way that it can be restored: by restoring the patriarchy. This will solve the women's deep-level problem, because instinct trumps ideology every time.



• Setback for indigenous alternatives: The planned import of several categories of weapons -- specifically light tanks, Israeli Spike LR anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), Israeli Heron unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), US-made SIG Sauer assault rifles and MiG-29 fighter aircraft -- will undercut Indian programmes to develop indigenous alternatives.



• China may buy Russia's Su-57: Unlike China, India does not have a fifth-generation fighter, so the Su-57 is an attractive warplane to India.



• Floods force China to blow up dam: China blasted holes in the Chuhe River dam in order to “alleviate the pressure of flood control” at the massive Three Gorges Dam.

Quick notes: Higher education | Green mobility...

• Disruption of Higher Education is Accelerating: The second-greatest accretion of stakeholder value in business, behind Amazon’s entry into health care, will be big (and some small) tech firms partnering with a world class university to offer 80% of a traditional four-year degree for 50% of the price.
  
  The myth/magic of campuses and geography is no longer a constraining factor — most programs will be hybrid soon, dramatically increasing enrollments among the best brands. MIT/Google could enroll 100,000 kids at $100,000 in tuition (a bargain), yielding $5 billion a year. Bocconi/Apple, Carnegie Mellon/Amazon, UCLA/Netflix, Berkeley/Microsoft … you get the idea.



• Blended learning: “Education is going to be online, offline.... a mix of both... it is going to be blended learning and it is going to stay.”



• Reduce viral load with Nasal rinsing and gargling with saline water: "Like hand wash, nose and throat wash may also remove or reduce viral load.



• Stealing research: US says Chinese hacking coronavirus vaccine research.



• Ultraviolet Sanitiser: DRDO lab develops device to sanitise electronic gadgets, papers



• Green mobility: Peaking interest on the humble two-wheeled bicycle has come as a pleasant surprise. “Under the National Disaster Management Act, the Centre has been issuing guidelines for the use of different vehicles. But there is no mention of bicycles or its benefits”. . . “The real cost of motorised transport hasn’t been calculated, though it is threatening the health of a large population. The govt should start campaigning for bicycles at all levels for a fit India”.



• Two must-read threads for deeper insight into Hindu minds:
Thread1:

You can complain all you want about Sai Baba and Satya Sai Baba. But they are giving today's Hindus something that they want.
To understand Baba and his devotees, you must understand human nature.
- Humans need faith. They need someone to hold their hand and tell them it's okay

— Suren (@zeneraalstuff) May 7, 2020


Thread2:

Very valid point

As traditional religious sects have turned into jaded establishments that are a pale shadow of what they once were, new institutions take their place https://t.co/rUBF9thsoN

— Śrīkānta Kṛṣṇamācārya (@shrikanth_krish) May 7, 2020

Quick notes: Trump visit | Dalit karsevak...

• Drones to wipe out Pak terrorists? India says interested in acquiring US UAV that killed Iranian general.



• Farmers want Modi to avoid unfair trade deals with Trump: The US farm bill 2019 allotted $867 billion as subsidy for American farmers whereas Indian farmers get relatively meagre support.

Allowing import of chicken legs, milk, apple, almond and walnut from America will hit Indian agriculture already reeling under a terrible agrarian distress. These imports will decimate India's poultry industry, hit dairy sector n hill farmers. @PiyushGoyal https://t.co/557V1kjP4H

— Devinder Sharma (@Devinder_Sharma) February 14, 2020




• Jaswant Singh, Mogappair, Chennai: This Tamil-speaking Sikh engineer created a home forest in Chennai




• Story of a Dalit Karsevak:  In Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s village, low caste people joined the RSS in large numbers: “Of the fifty or so children who attended the shakha in my village, most were OBCs—Kumhar, Jat, Gurjar, Mali and so on. He was part of the first attempt at building the Ram temple, in the context of the Rath Yatra in October 1990. Then, he was “exhilarated”, chanting “To die for Ram-ji is such an honour…”. He and his Rajasthani comrades in arms were taught “how to evade the police” and were “told that implements to destroy the structure – hoes, spades, crowbars – would be provided by locals at Ayodhya”.
  
  As the train started to slide out of the station, all the important functionaries slid out of the train.. I saw how one by one, the big folk, the industrialists, the sangh pracharaks, the leaders of VHP and BJP, all excused themselves. Having wished us well, they went back to their homes. Only people like me remained—impassioned Dalits, Adivasis, other young people from the lower castes, and a few sadhus and sants. To take charge of us, some lower-order functionaries tried to put us at ease, don’t worry, these people have other contingents to see off and then they’ll follow us directly to Ayodhya. They were never to come. They were sensible people and went back to their homes. I understood that sensible people always use us, we who are driven by passion; they push us into battle and return to their safe little coops. 
  
  However, Bhanwar Meghwanshi did not draw any conclusion from this episode but went to Ayodhya as a disciplined foot-soldier. He did not listen to his father, a Congress activist who had become sarpanch of his village and who explained to him that RSS needed Dalits primarily to fight against Muslims physically, something upper caste preferred not to do. 
  
  Soon after Bhanwar Meghwanshi fully realised the resilience of caste in the RSS on another occasion: while he had prepared food for Sangh parivar members who were touring his district, they refused to come to his home for eating; instead they took the food with them in order to save time and, they said, feed the village where they going next – but they threw it out on the road. Bhanwar Meghwanshi was shocked:  How can the Sangh do this to me? They don’t believe in untouchability, in caste discrimination, they believe all Hindus to be one, they talk of a united Hindu society, and then this kind of hypocrisy? 
  
  “I resolved to tear the veil of fake harmony from the face of the Sangh and its family of institutions and expose their real face in public”.



• Aabid Surti: India's water warrior.

One man is dedicated to conserving India's water pic.twitter.com/SGwcXUE1SP

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) February 16, 2020




• Dani P K: The Kerala kid whose 'zero angle' goal went viral

Quick notes: Traffic fines | Lamborghini e-motor...

• Traffic fines in Europe: In Finland, speeding tickets are linked to your income. Switzerland and UK use a similar system. . . France, Finland, Spain and Germany all have laws that can send speeding repeat offenders to jail.



• Supercapacitors for supercars: Lamborghini employs supercapacitors rather than a battery in its most powerful car ever... Supercapacitors  in conjunction with a somewhat slower and more stable battery chemistry hold lot of promise in automobiles.



• Dirty export: Dirty air from Indo-Gangetic plains messing up neighbourhood... Roughly 30% of the boundary layer ozone in eastern India and Bangladesh comes from the Indo-Gangetic Plain and central India.



• China backs RCEP to extend its trade hegemony: India openly blamed China for unfair trade policies that created an enormous trade deficit.“The big question now is if they would like to proceed without India, which could cause some big push back from New Zealand and Australia.”



• Impact of Article 370? Netanyahu vows to annex all settlements, starting with Jordan Valley



• Thillana Brindavani:




• Tavleen Singh discovers Hindutva: Savarkar rejects the caste system and makes a serious case for Hindus to respect science and modern technology. One of the things he disapproved of totally was cow worship.



• British atrocities: Archbishop of Canterbury apologizes for massacre in India



• Here’s why: India’s Moon Mission was anything but a failure.



• Awesome Without Allah,:

Muslim twitter is having a meltdown over #AwesomeWithoutAllah, Personal attacks, homophobic abuses, misogynistic comments, abuses towards families etc are rife in comments sections. All because we dared verbalising positive changes in our lives after leaving Islam.

— ali.malik (@apostateali) September 7, 2019

Quick notes: Abhyas | Waferscale integration...

• Drone or a destroyer?  Abhyas can act as a decoy aircraft and a high speed subsonic missile. If this system was available before the Balakote strikes, this drone could have worked as decoy aircraft to test the defence mechanism of Pakistan.



• Pest-fighter: China drone attack on crop-eating ‘monster’ shows 98% kill rate



• Trapped in traffic: Indians spend 7% of their day in office commute, Bengaluru travels slowest.



• Emulation of West can be deadly if you forget your roots:

Since 2009 till today I've noticed much changes of people in India. In just 10 years I've witness a dramatic western change in appearance, attitude & talk. Globalization doesn’t mean Westernization. Emulation of West can be deadly if you forget your roots. Keep Hindu Heritage 🙏

— Renee Lynn (@Voice_For_India) August 30, 2019




• Collectives vs. Individuals: (From the archives of this blog). . . Perhaps a reformed caste system is the best form of harmonious collective. Individuals - and indeed entire castes - would be free to change their collective characteristics, while continuing to bind themselves to the rules of the collective - and collectives binding with each other. All with the glue of a duties-based Dharma Just the right balance between rights-based democratic individualism and duty-based collectivism



• Waferscale Integration: Machine Learning chip breaks new ground.

1/ Cerebras just built a chip with 50x the transistor count, 1,000x the memory and 10,000x the bandwidth of Nvidia’s flagship GPU. One such 'chip' could replace an entire rack of Nvidia GPUs.

What the heck is going on? pic.twitter.com/Rs0FaAzLUS

— James Wang (@jwangARK) August 20, 2019




• China used iPhone hacks to target Uyghurs: Victims were tricked into opening a link, which when opened would load one of the malicious websites used to infect the victim. It’s a common tactic to target phone owners with spyware.



• In Kaangress' footsteps: High Command culture comes to BJP



• IndianRaga Fellows:




• "Healthy" rubbish:

This junk being sold in the name of health has 45% MAIDA. And how misleading is the picture! Says 5 grains and contains only 14% grains. The word ‘Whole’ used 4 times on side of the pack. Older generation, most of whom are diabetic, are a fan of this rubbish. @BritanniaIndLtd pic.twitter.com/4ItD9ZKJ0h

— V (@AnkitaDontSing) August 17, 2019

Quick notes: Next Pakistan, Spaced repetition...

• Betrayal as national policy: Turkey is turning into the next Pakistan 



• “Spaced Repetition”: The scientific, efficient way to learn languages.



• A bear and tiger fight at Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve:




• China dangles carrots to lure foreign talent: The talent pool at Zhongguancun Science Park has over 10,000 foreign hires. The goal is to attract top-notch scientists and their innovation teams from all over the world.



• Right priorities: China is beating back traffic in its most congested cities. More than half of the top 30 most-congested cities in 2016 saw a decline in the time drivers spent in rush hour traffic one year later.



• Chinese Stealth: How China's Geely spent months stealthily building a $9 billion stake in Daimler



• Investigate the RBI: When questions were raised how Harshad Mehta functioned, the RBI blamed everybody except the RBI. If you start an honest investigation, the first stop is the role of the RBI.  If you are not going to investigate the RBI now, we are putting our banking system into turmoil... The system has been designed carefully to ensure this is not audited or even when audited not much comes out and even some one points out something, the officials within the system connive to bury the matter. 



• Neonicotinoids: Pesticides put bees at risk, European watchdog confirms 



• On caste: The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks. In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution --Swami Vivekananda

Quick notes: Temple lands, Dharma lesson...

• Hindus penalized for 'Vikas Mandate': BJP-led Maharashtra govt to sell vast tracts held by temple trusts. The State Cabinet amended existing laws, allowing transfer of Devasthan Inams land held by individuals and 4,000 temple trusts, including the ones at Shirdi, Siddhivinayak, Pandharpur and Mahalaxmi in Kolhapur.... vikas gando thayo chhe



• Muslims didn't vote for Vikas, so reward them: Same govt increases the budget of Haj Committee.

BJP-led Maharashtra govt says #budget of State Haj Committee will be increased.

— All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) January 11, 2018




• Shia board's warning: Shia Central Waqf Board urges govt to shut down madrassas in the country, alleging that education imparted in these Islamic schools encouraged students to join terrorist ranks.



• Chinese H1-B: China is issuing long-term visas to lure highly skilled people from abroad to work in the country. Technology leaders, entrepreneurs and scientists from in-demand sectors are among those eligible to apply.



• Exodus triggered by growing innovation: Chinese workers abandon Silicon Valley for riches back home



• Dharma lesson by Max Muller:  What India teaches us is that in a state advancing towards civilization, there must be always two castes or two classes of men, a caste of Brahmans or of thinkers, and a caste of Kshatriyas, who are to fight; possibly other castes also of those who are to work and of those who are to serve. Great wars went on in India, but they were left to be fought by the warriors by profession. The peasants in their villages remained quiet, accepting the consequences, whatever they might be, and the Brahmans lived on, thinking and dreaming in their forests, satisfied to rule after the battle was over.
  
  And what applies to military struggles seems to me to apply to all struggles—political, religious, social, commercial, and even literary. Let those who love to fight, fight; but let others who are fond of quiet work go on undisturbed in their own special callings.



• AWAKE: The Life of Yogananda

Quick notes: Moringa craze, Dietary fiber...

• Moringa craze takes over: Drumstick leaves, the superfood of 2018... soon, poor Indians won't be able to afford it



• Why fiber is good for you: Dietary fiber = undigested by humans = food for gut bacteria. Byproduct is short-chain fatty acids — absorbed by intestinal cells, which use it as fuel.



• Clean meat: Cell-cultured “clean” meat is grown by extracting cells from an animal and then growing those cells in a bioreactor filled with a high-tech nutrient-dense liquid. The cells feed on the liquid and proliferate, producing chicken meat that’s molecularly identical to conventional meat without having ever slaughtered an animal.



• Tax on disposable coffee cups: Bengaluru should consider this.



• Maneeshaa Panchakam: He who is firmly established in the Pure Consciousness – be he a Chandala (outcaste) or a Brahmana, such a one is indeed worthy of being a Guru.
  
  ..dridha prajna api yasya asti chet, chandaalah astu sah tu dvijah astu guruh iti..




• Bollywood's lack of ideas: What happened to all those life-changing films like V. Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (about prison reform), Mehboob Khan's Mother India (about matriarchal pride and dignity), Bimal Roy's Sujata (about eradicating the caste system).....?



• Slam vs Slam: Islamic State declares war on rival Hamas with video execution



• It's Time to End Pakistan's Double Game: Pakistan concocted a complex strategy of cooperating on logistics and occasional help with hunting Al Qaeda leaders in exchange for massive U.S. aid, while simultaneously building out a clandestine program to reconstitute the Taliban.

President @realDonaldTrump’s first tweet of 2018. A promising message to Afghans who have suffered at the hands of terrorists based in Pakistan for far too long. https://t.co/NJdYB5qOWl

— Hamdullah Mohib (@hmohib) January 1, 2018