@smitabarooah The thing that hurts the most is the crass comments on the PM. I hope they face the consequences whether in the present or in the future. Cant still digets the fact that the most abusive language was used by girls. Shameful.
@prakdadlani Happy birthday Prakashji. Wishing u good health and im sure this factory incident is just one tiny hindrance before u will be sprinting with success.
I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours.
This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it.
Let me tell you what actually happened.
The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12.
381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find.
India sent five kids.
All five came back with gold.
Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad.
We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :)
That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them.
Now here is what the exam actually was.
Two papers. Each five hours long.
The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs.
The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids.
That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer.
Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours.
HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too.
Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO.
Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze.
In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver.
Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade.
Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018.
So who built this.
The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy.
They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane.
The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai.
The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri.
Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra.
This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own.
The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast.
That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world.
But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think.
That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years.
So yes, be proud. Loudly.
HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD.
But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India.
I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have.
But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying.
Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.
In 1990, Sarla Bhat, 27, was working as a staff nurse at Srinagar’s SKIMS hospital to support her family, even as fear forced her community to flee.
On April 15, 1990, Sarla was abducted from her hostel. For four agonizing days, JKLF terrorists subjected her to brutal torture and sexual assault. When her body was dumped in Mallabagh on April 19, her killers had carved the acronym "JKLF" directly into her flesh from a knife.
The horror continued for her family. When Sarla’s bullet-ridden body returned to Anantnag, the neighborhood was already a ghost town emptied by the exodus. Marooned and helpless, the grieving family could not find enough people to carry her to a funeral pyre. As they attempted her final rites, a grenade was hurled at their home. This targeted terror forced the last remaining Hindu families to flee.
Systemic apathy followed. Though a police complaint was filed in 1990, the file was buried. It took until 2025 for a Special Investigation Agency to reopen the case, naming four terrorists. Two are dead, one is absconding, and one is imprisoned: Yasin Malik, who was once pampered as a Damaad by New Delhi, invited to the high table as one of the esteemed "stakeholders in the Kashmir peace talks." Yesterday, chargesheet was filed in this case.
Sarla’s case is not isolated. Thousands of women faced similar brutality in Kashmir during the late 1980s and 1990s, leaving behind stories that have been completely erased from the records today.
India set up a fully functional field hospital in earthquake-hit Venezuela, thousands of kilometres away, simply to help those in need.
This won’t dominate timelines or rack up 50 million views. But let there be one racist post targeting Indians, and it spreads like wildfire.
Humanitarian work rarely goes viral. Hate almost always does.
@DeepikaBhardwaj Add mehendi, indigo in some water ( the water should be boiled with tea leaves) incase u want a dark brown tinge add coffee. Also add egg for the conditioner effect. I use hair colour once in a quarter and this mix in between.
If an average business is still running on four separate WhatsApp groups, a complex Excel sheet only one person understands, and a physical diary nobody is allowed to touch... it’s time for an upgrade.
Custom software used to cost lakhs and take months to develop. Those days are officially over.
Raj Shamani and Emergent have teamed up to launch a 14-Day Challenge to make Indian businesses AI-native, and there is a ₹1 Crore prize pool on the line.
@san_x_m Very informative. Almost 95% of ppl do not understand this concept that nomination does not imply that the deceased has left the money to u. All that the nominee is a mere custodian.