Arindam Goswami

Here to learn, absorb and discuss! Opinions/Likes/RTs personal. Likes/Shares/RTs are not endorsement.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani Aspiring for better nutrition, healthcare,lifestyle is good. Glamourising poor lifestyle to have bigger families seems wrong. Prioritising quantity over quality for some future benefit (which is unproven, unknown now) seems wrong. Especially, with all the knowledge we have now.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani The "bear"ing you say we did earlier, hurts the kids.This adjusting, compromise is not good. It's like saying-why complain about bad rooms,toilets at the Commonwealth Games-pehle toh India mein isi gandagi mein bhi khelte hi the. We know better now. So,don't settle for less.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani @naishe But would you ask anybody to have kids if they can't raise them well enough? The "well enough" part can't include current govt schools and hospitals-mere existence of these. Can't say ki have kids now, we'll figure out how to improve schools and hospitals in few years or decades.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani Support how (other than govt stopping recommending sterilisation)? Surely not taxes,subsidies to encourage more children? Why should govt tip the scale?With increasing mechanisation, automation, AI->fewer ppl reqd. Also,pensions will be paid out of my own "current" contributions.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@pranesh As @gautambhatia88 says, our courts have become an extended arm of the executive. Willing to help the executive whenever required. "NEET nahin ho pa raha hai tumse, kya chahiye - Telegram ban? Lo, de diya!" Reasoning - bro asked for help.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani Still unclear about benefits of having more children. What about the consequences of encouraging more children? The supposed benefit of more productivity & standards could easily get defeated by lack of jobs, other problems. Where's the cost-benefit analysis before policy change?

[Gaurav Sabnis @gauravsabnis]

When I expressed horror at Marathis doing Visarjan in Thames & Lake Huron, so many people asked, why didn't authorities stop them?

Because authorities are generally not used to people dumping stuff in rivers & lakes as a religious ritual that's being phased out even in India.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani What is a big enough family? For India? And when we reach that number, will shaming having more than that number going to be fine?

[Gaurav Sabnis @gauravsabnis]

IKEA exists in many countries with identical layouts and you don't see this wholesale cringe behavior anywhere else.

Stop trying to make generalizable excuses for what are uniquely Indian problems. You hold the country back with this laborious apologia for objective cringe.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani @jessesingal Is there really any shaming happening of people having large families (except, of course, the communal reason)? For instance, govt restricting benefits upto "n" number of children isn't shaming. Govts do have limited resources.

[Nitin Pai @acorn]

All of us live in cities where there are fuel tanks.

So we shouldn't be laughing at tank in Moscow being blown up by Ukrainian missiles.

We should be horrified. It can happen to us too.

Recent wars have destroyed norms that protected civilians. They need to be restored.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani Aren't you being a little disingenuous? Not knowing how your statement wud most likely get construed, or pretending to not know - both bad. Not knowing/understanding what exactly someone means when they say "free ed or healthcare doesn't exist" & taking it literally - also bad.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@pranesh @JanhaviNilekani Why is a higher TFR desirable? "Slow adaptation" to a smaller adult pop. doesn't really cut it as a reason - it can be speeded up. Also, she's given no data to prove "how difficult/dire" it'll be for society to "protect" living standards in future, even if it sounds intuitive.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

@JanhaviNilekani Why is a higher TFR desirable? "Slow adaptation" to a smaller adult pop. doesn't really cut it as a reason - it can be speeded up. Also, you've given no data to prove "how difficult/dire" it'll be for society to "protect" living standards in future, even if it sounds intuitive.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

Getting lucky in making some observation, & then post facto, constructing some bs theory to explain it, doesn't make a system great. Imaginative, yes. But even those who founded Ay would laugh at people still studying Ay, revering it, & not wanting to move on from Ay-love.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

"The West will continue to "discover" what India always knew." - Ancient India (in fact, ancient world) didn't "know", it could only "guess". That is why, you should not trust anything ancient blindly, which is what trusting Ayurveda is. It is harmful to trust it blindly.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The West removes ancient experiential wisdom from its cultural context, maps it to a molecular pathway & names it something like Autophagy (which got a Nobel in 2016)/Intermittent Fasting and suddenly it is ‘science’. If our Indian grandma tells us to fast on Ekadashi, she is a backward dogmatist. But when Dr. Valter Longo does this for us in a Cell Stem Cell journal, it becomes a major medical breakthrough.

When Ayurveda says Langhana (fasting) fires up Agni which burns Ama, they were indeed naming the very same phenomenon as Dr Longo. Ayurveda witnessed the forest: “When we stop putting wood in the fire, the fire burns the dead leaves inside the house.

Modern Science says: “Glucose depletion negatively impacts the PKA pathway, activating a decrease in IGF-1 & initiating regeneration with hematopoietic stem cells.”

Looking at the same mountain from 2 different angles shows two interpretations. 1 describes a user manual for life; the other a chemistry breakdown of the machine.

Modern peer review is a gatekeeping mechanism with deep ties to the Western pharma & academic economy. Producing a scientific paper requires significant financial resources to support research, publication & distribution.

There is no profit in telling people to eat nothing. Therefore, for decades, Western science actively ignored fasting research because it did not feed the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical pipeline.

The moment it became clear that fasting could complement chemotherapy, reducing the toxic side effects of multi-billion dollar oncology drugs, suddenly funding appeared, papers were reviewed, and it became "validated."

The West will continue to "discover" what India always knew. The goal for young India now is to stop waiting for a Western certificate of approval. We need to fund our own clinical research, study our own texts with scientific rigor & reclaim the narrative before it is packaged & sold back to us in a capsule.

[Arindam Goswami @AriGos]

Therefore, if any modern scientific experiment proves something that Ay recommended, even then the modern experiment should get the sole credit, not Ay, because the scientific rigour lay in the experiment. You can trust the modern results because it can explain the causality.

[Takshashila Institution @TakshashilaInst]

Japan spent most of the last eighty years as the textbook case of a pacifist state. A constitution that renounces war, a one percent cap on defence spending, a ban on selling weapons abroad. That picture is now changing fast. Tokyo has built counterstrike missiles, started exporting lethal equipment, and set out to double its defence budget. Join Arindam Goswami (@AriGos) and Vanshika Saraf in this episode of All Things Policy as we talk about what has changed, what hasn't, and why a country can rearm without ever rewriting the rule that says it can't. 

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