Anish Kikle

[The Touchline | 𝐓 @TouchlineX]

🚨🤍 𝗡𝗘𝗪: Yan Diomande emotional letter to his late sister:

"Dear Roxane,

Remember when somebody bought me a fake United jersey, and I wrote Ronaldo 7 on the back with the black marker?"

"We didn’t know rich or poor. We just knew happiness."

"Remember 25 people sleeping in one house back in Abidjan? Mum wanted to watch her soap operas. Everyone else wanted to watch movies. Remember how I always used to fake like I was asleep and then go into the TV room after midnight? I’d put the TV on real low. Just like 2 volume bars. I’d watch football in the dark and dream."

"Remember when the adults saw me playing football in the dirt and nicknamed me “Roberto Carlos” because of how hard I would shoot? And remember how I was secretly so mad about it, because CR7 was my idol?"

"Remember when I went to play so far from home? I was 9 years old. Inter Foot Sud Comoé, all the way near the Ghana border. Just a little boy on his own. I don’t know if I ever told you this story, but me and the other kids used to go into the village and steal potatoes because we were so hungry. We did a “bank heist.” Two kids distracting the shop owner, and 18 other kids running out with two potatoes. They weren’t even good. But they tasted amazing. Hahahah. It’s still my favorite thing to eat. Boiled potatoes with some oil. It reminds me of those times."

"Remember when I got my first real football boots, and I used to sleep with them? Growing up, I always played in those white plastic sandals. Even when I go back home now, I still play in them. It’s our tradition."

"Remember when I would come back home, and you would tell my friends from the neighborhood, “Why did you stop training? Yan is not going to buy you cars. You have to keep working."

"You were 10 years old, and already my agent."

"Remember how we used to sit and dream about moving to France? How we were going to go shopping and get our own apartment and I was going to be a rich footballer with cars and a big house, and you wouldn’t have to worry about nothing. You were the one who always believed that I could be the next Cristiano, when everybody else laughed."

"Remember when I moved to America for high school at 15, and I was so homesick? I didn’t know what anybody was saying for months. They sat me next to a French kid, and he tried to translate everything the teacher was saying. Remember when I called you, saying, “You won’t believe it, the kids here argue with teachers."

"Back home, you know we wouldn’t even dare to blink at our elders."

"Remember when I couldn’t believe the kids were smoking after school? You used to say it sounded like I was in an American TV show."

"Remember when they took me on trial at Bournemouth? At Chelsea, Rangers, Olympiacos, Crystal Palace? Eze and Olise even came up to me after one training and said, “Yo kid, you’re really good.”"

"But they still didn’t sign me."

"Even the B teams in the MLS didn’t want me. I didn’t even know why. They never gave me a reason. The adults handled everything. They just kept taking me all around Europe, and everybody kept saying no."

"My visa was up. My dream was over. They sent me back to Africa, and we cried together."

"You were the one who never stopped believing. A few weeks later, I signed for Leganés and we cried different tears."

"That was back when I used to have emotions. Now, I don’t feel anything. It’s like I’m not even human. Since you died, I’m just blank."

"I don’t even think I shed a tear the day they told me that you were gone. I was just in shock."

"It was a few weeks after I made my debut for Leganés. Who makes their debut at 18 against Real Madrid? It was too crazy. It was a dream."

"And then it was a nightmare. Someone kept calling me from back home. I was annoyed. I didn’t understand why they kept calling me."

"I picked up, and they didn’t even soften it. You know how it is back home. No emotions. Just……..

“Your sister is gone.”
“What?”
“She died.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Somebody put something in her drink at a party, and she never woke up. She is gone.”

"You were 15."

"15."

"I never got any answers. I don’t know if I want to know why. Maybe it was jealousy. Maybe it’s just something that happens in our country. Maybe I could have protected you. I don’t know."

"I try to trust God’s plan. It’s all I can do. I don’t try to forget, because I know I won’t forget. All I can do is use the pain to work harder, and to do everything we dreamed about."

"I wrote this because I can’t speak about it. I wrote this because I want you to know that I will make sure that you live on. I will make sure that everybody knows your name. The whole world."

"Everything I do on a football pitch, it’s for you."

"So much has happened since I last saw you…… You would not even believe it. I don’t know if I believe it."

"You know what’s crazy? After my debut against Madrid, I actually swapped shirts with Mbappé. Remember when we used to watch him on TV, and you’d say, “Mbappé? Yeah, he’s good. But my brother is better.”

"I was wrong about one thing. I don’t want to be rich. I see what it does to people, even to family. When I was at Leganés, everything I was earning, I was sending home. It got to the point where I didn’t even want money anymore. It was just a burden. They never stopped asking. I guess they thought I was a millionaire already. I didn’t even have an apartment. I was living at the training ground in a room with no TV. Just football and sleep, football and sleep."

"I didn’t want a big house. I didn’t want cars. I just wanted to put everything into football. Everything to show the world that my sister was right……."

"Ha…. you will think this is funny. When I moved to play at RB Leipzig, I was always late. Well, not late. But I was on time, which in Germany means you’re very late."

"So you already know what I did next. I started arriving 90 minutes early to everything. I was so early all the time that the guys started calling me “The German.”"

"I always have to overdo everything. I have zero chill. You always said that."

"The pitch is the only place that I feel at home anymore. It’s the place where I feel calm, and I can speak to you. I just wish you were still here so I could tell you….. We did it."

"Everything you said came true."

"We’re leaving for the World Cup tomorrow. For real. Your brother is going to play for Côte d'Ivoire, like Drogba, like Yaya, like Gervinho."

"I don’t even look at it like a game. I look at it like a stage. This is my chance to show the whole world what you saw in me. Every time I score, I’ll make sure everybody knows your name. I’ll make sure they don’t forget you."

"You always said that I could be better than Cristiano. If I see him there, I’ll tell him hello for you."

"I’m going to do what you predicted, I swear. Before I even had real boots, you were telling everybody, “My brother is going to be the greatest in the world.”

"I will prove that you were right, or I will die trying... Your brother, Yan."

— @PlayersTribune

[H🍂 @HayArshii]

J. Nagarathna clapped demonstratively when J. Mohana came to take oath basically showing the sisterhood which she was talking about some days back.✨

[Johns. @CricCrazyJohns]

A SPECIAL POST BY JUSTIN LANGER ON VAIBHAV SOORYAVANSHI ❤️😍

[Arjun* @mxtaverse]

"Mamata refuses to resign"
"Governor refuses to allow Vijay to take oath"

Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Singhvi:

[HLTCO @HLTCO]

Football is fucking great, innit?

Look at these Real Sociedad celebrations following their Copa del Rey win. Magic.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

“Pressure is a Privilege. And if you’re feeling any pressure or weight of expectation, you are breathing rare air, that very few of us get to live inside”. - Tom Hiddleston

[Albert Ortega @AlbertOrtegaES1]

La afición de la Real Sociedad canta el himno en La Cartuja. El capitán Oyarzabal levanta la Copa del Rey. El presidente Aperribay rompe a llorar.

Qué momento.

[𝔻𝕒𝕟. @fwdaniels]

you finally married her, found a good job, made your parents proud, living a happy life but then you see this spinning non stop on the table. 💔

[Jedi @dhe3g]

That Key & Peele skit was too accurate😭

[OldMonkofCricket @OldMonkOfCric]

Remember this? when a ball boy dropped a sitter, so Colin Munro gave him a hug and a quick coaching session

Next ball, the kid pulls off an absolute STUNNER and Munro celebrates with him like a teammate.

This is what cricket is all about. Pure gold🔥

[Mundo Pelota @mundopelotanet]

Por favor, no se pierdan este RECONTRA GOLAZO de Manisha Kalyan, figura de la Selección de India y del ALIANZA LIMA de Perú, en la Copa Asiática Femenina.

Se despidió del torneo con esta locura de gol de tiro libre ante China Taipei. 💥🇮🇳 #WAC2026

[Abhishek Singhvi @DrAMSinghvi]

Most “abhisheks” are good, even very good, even very very good!!

[Ravi Shastri @RaviShastriOfc]

As the World Cup moves into the business end, with all eyes on the big stage… the most heart-warming story of last week came from elsewhere.

Jammu & Kashmir lifting the Ranji Trophy for the very first time. Let that sink in. What a journey. What a story. Paras Dogra, Ajay Sharma and this fearless bunch have taken the long road, knocking over heavyweights, game after game, with grit and self-belief. No shortcuts. Just hard cricket and big hearts.

That’s the beauty of the #RanjiTrophy. It throws up fairy tales. And this one will be remembered for a long, long time. Massive congratulations to the boys from J&K. You’ve made the entire cricketing fraternity proud. #Cricket

[Mahesh Jethmalani @JethmalaniM]

One detail from this Iran war should make every serious state sit up: credible reporting says Israeli leaders were shown an image of Khamenei’s body after it was recovered by Mossad agents - and that Israel had visibility on his fate faster than Iran could even confirm the death of it's supreme leader and shape the narrative. That’s not “tech”. That’s HUMINT + penetration.

Satellites don’t tell you who is in which room at what time. Signals don’t always survive encryption and discipline. What wins you wars and prevents surprises is human access so-urces, moles, defectors, recruited assets - the messy, thankless work of being inside the enemy’s bloodstream.

Israel has no luxury of being lazy at intelligence. It sits in a hostile neighbourhood with actors who openly want it erased. So it builds networks that aren’t “near the border.” They’re near the decision-makers. That’s what survival looks like when geography is unforgiving.

Now bring that lens to India. When you live next to Pakistan’s terror ecosystem and a Bangladesh theatre that keeps throwing up radical modules, you don’t get to be sentimental about “soft power” as a substitute for hard intelligence. You need early warning, deep penetration, counter-infiltration, and ruthless disruption - before the plot becomes a headline.

And this is exactly where the armchair moralists fail India. They love questioning operations after the fact. They hate the boring investments before the fact: intel budgets, source protection, language capability, field tradecraft, inter-agency fusion, and the political spine to back covert work without leaking it for TRPs.

Pop culture and superhit movies like Dhurandhar tells the story really well but makes it look stylish - one hero, one mission, one punchline. Real HUMINT though is the opposite: years of patience, ugly risks, zero credit, and often no medal because the best outcome is “nothing happened.”

This is not about chest-thumping. This is about statecraft. The world is moving into an age where wars are decided by who sees first, knows first, and shapes first. Israel gets that. India must get that - permanently. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and our intelligence apparatus, NEW INDIA definitely gets it.

Because 'terrorist harbouring neighbours' don’t send calendar invites before they strike. They send handlers, money, propaganda, and sleepers. The only answer is being inside that machinery early enough to break it.

If you want deterrence, stop thinking intelligence is an accessory. It’s the foundation.

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

100X better than Beyonce covering Jolene

[Anish Kikle @KikleAnish]

@keeetzo Take two phones and compare

[diplo @diplo]

I was 20 when I first came to India with nothing but a restless mind and an old Enfield I bought from a friend in Delhi who taught me to ride in one dusty afternoon. He took my money, flew back to Florida, and left me with one rule: don’t hit a cow, and only ride between 2–6 a.m. if you want to survive the heat and smog. Somehow, that became a philosophy for everything that followed.

I crossed the country like a kid inside a dream — Calcutta to Delhi to Rishikesh — sleeping on the bike when I had to, chasing chai stalls to stay awake, tossing the bike on trains when I could afford it. I swam in the Ganges, did yoga with elders who moved like water, bought vinyl in back-alley shops, fell in love the way only your twenties let you, and wrote long confusing emails to my mom from glowing village internet cafés.

In Gujarat I stopped long enough to help with earthquake relief, eat thalis in strangers’ homes, and learn “Kem Cho” and “Majama.” India didn’t just teach me independence — it cracked me open creatively. It showed me how improvisation is its own kind of discipline, how getting lost is a form of education.

I never imagined I’d be invited back years later to collaborate with artists I once watched on café computers — working with actors like SRK, making videos like “Lean On” that crossed billions of views, nearly dying during spiritual side quests in Leh and Varanasi, falling for Bollywood sweethearts, and still believing every strange turn meant something.

Twenty-five years later I returned to these roads, riding nine hours a day across the Himalayas on a much newer Enfield. And then — perfectly — I ended up performing at a massive Enfield festival in Goa and celebrating afterward in a motorcycle garage, as if time folded back on itself.

Two decades have changed India and me both. But every time I come back, I feel the same truth: growth happens when you surrender to the unknown, when the road teaches you more than any classroom could.

India was my beginning. And somehow, it still is.

[Supriya Sahu IAS @supriyasahuias]

Hello again to all those glued to Amur Watch !
The Amur Falcons are rewriting the limits of endurance. From the forests of Manipur, three satellite-tagged travellers Apapang, Alang and Ahu have taken the world by storm. Here is the latest update from their epic journey. You will notice Apapang and Alang have crossed into Kenya... while Ahu continues to stay at the northern tip of Somalia. They are likely to stopover at Tsavo National Park in Kenya

Apapang (Orange tag)
The hero of the season.
6,100 km in 6 days 8 hours nonstop.
A single unbroken arc across continents.

Alang (Yellow tag)
The youngest with incredible grit.
5,600 km in 6 days 14 hours, including a night halt in Telangana and a 3-hour breather in Maharashtra before powering towards the Arabian Sea.

Ahu (Red tag)
steady and strong.
5,100 km in 5 days 14 hours, with a night pause in western Bangladesh before joining the great transoceanic push. (Her distance is lower because she took a more northerly and relatively shorter route to Somalia.)

Together, they embody the raw beauty of migration, precision, instinct, wind, stamina, and courage.
What a season ! What a journey ! As told by @SureshWII @wii_india to @supriyasahuias #AmurFalconMigration

[Venky Mama @venkymama100]

PEAK MALE CONTENT🔥

As BCCI is not conducting any day night test matches, me and boys playing day night test match with pink ball 🤩