Akshay Oka

Data Analyst by trade, Man Utd & Steelers fan, passionate about astronomy, reading, business & financial markets

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

If people learned to pay attention to denominators, most scaremongering content would disappear in no time

[Siddharth Singh @siddharth3]

Yes, 43°C in India feels different to 43°C in Europe. Allow me to explain.

1. Europe is much more north on the planet, compared to the tropical location of India. For example, Paris is even north of Toronto in Canada. In India, the sun hits from the top. In Europe, it hits at an angle, and significantly longer summer days can yield strong solar loads through the course of a day. So the sun feels different.

2. India’s air pollution (suspended particulate matter) dulls the sun a bit. The sun feels sharper in Europe due to the clear skies, while pollution in India scatters and dissipates heat differently.

3. The recent heat waves in Europe have been accompanied with very low or zero winds. The leaves on trees don’t have a hint of movement. So it feels suffocating in a different way. In India, the warm winds and humidity might have different effects.

4. Europe has historically been cooler, so its buildings have been designed to remain warm in winters, while Indian buildings are designed to remain cool in summers. For example, stone or tiled floors in India dissipate heat quickly in summers, but also mean that you can’t walk bare feet in winters. Meanwhile European households might have wooden floors that don’t feel cool in the summers. Some European cities also have black roofs as a norm, which trap heat.

5. Much of Europe has had very limited number of warm days through history, so air conditioning is not a norm. Why would households invest in ACs when it crosses 25°C (minimum) for less than 7 days a year? New York has 4-5x more frequent warm days than Paris, for example. But that’s now changing. As it gets warmer, the case for ACs is obvious.

6. Much of Europe values aesthetics and public spaces a lot. So buildings associations oppose ugly heat-blowing external AC units facing the streets. This is why European cities are the most beautiful and walkable on the planet. Would you sit down to have wine and pasta on a street side cafe if an ugly AC unit was blowing hot air onto you? But of course, it’s too hot during heat waves now, so buildings associations will be forced to relent and change their rules. (You can also find some examples of some activists or institutions opposing ACs for climate change reasons, but I think that has a much smaller impact on decisions than actual building rules).

But the ultimate reality is this: as heat waves get hotter and longer, ACs will become the norm in Europe as well. Most offices and shopping centres are already air conditioned. Households are increasingly purchasing them too.

And the other reality is that Indians suffer a lot from heat waves too, even at 43°C. We just don’t report human interest stories the same way. Many don’t have ACs, live under tin roofs, and are hit by a constant stream of hot AC exhaust air from neighbours. We all need to prepare better for our respective heat waves.

[vir sanghvi @virsanghvi]

Sharp Edge:The Ugly Indian.
Why have Indian tourists become so unwelcome abroad? Is it because we display no consideration for local sensibilities? Is it because we can be loud & pushy? Is it because we are aggressive & arrogant (especially in Asia?)

https://t.co/L1abCohP4A

[Akshay Oka @M42Fan]

@soorajchandran_ A nuance when it comes to the wealth creation point - the need for savings is much higher in India - Healthcare, retirement, kids education and potential wedding expenses, rainy day funds for job loss etc. Lot of these are partially or fully covered by high EU taxes.

[Melissa Reddy @MelissaReddy_]

INEOS kept on a manager they had no faith in, openly canvassing Europe for his successor but then armed him with £200m to spend on players he wanted, and changed the backroom staff before sacking him anyway. They axed a sporting director, whose way of working was well established, because he did not fit in with how they wanted him to work. He warned them about selecting a head coach attached to a fixed style of play, which didn’t suit the squad and how expensive it would be to build a quality 3-4-3. They didn’t listen, insisted they believed wholeheartedly in Ruben Amorim’s approach, but then wouldn’t fully back it in the transfer market and asked him to change the tactical principles that attracted them to him. Some “best in class” decision-making…

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

We all want to root for Sarvam. But wanting isn't enough when you're selling duty and technical jargon instead of desire. It’s a narrative problem.

Right now, my perception of Sarvam's unsaid positioning feels like "We’ve done some cool technical stuff. Support us because we're Indian AI."

A semi technical idiot such as I can’t make head or tail of what they’re claiming to have achieved. The latter bit is also the exact narrative trap that didn’t end up helping Koo, Hike, and every other "patriotic alternative."

In 2025, when every other day brings a new AI breakthrough, you can't ship a model and expect the world to care just because it handles Indic languages. Even if you build something revolutionary tomorrow, adoption needs more than good intentions and GitHub stars.

The "we're going B2B" defense doesn't hold either. Today's enterprise buyers discover through consumer buzz. The lines have blurred beyond recognition.

Here's the playbook that I, a technical dumbo thinks might actually work?

1. Make magic, not models

Nobody (aka semi technical idiots like me) cares about your 24B parameters. They probably care about their grandmother finally being able to use technology the way they do. Show that. Ship a demo that makes someone cry because their regional poetry finally sounds beautiful in AI. Or whatever it is that you can pull off. It’s an emotional game. Don’t wait on me to figure out what you’re capable of.

2. Own the conversation

Where are your founders showing up? Your engineers? In 2025, faceless companies die. Perplexity has Aravind. OpenAI has Sam. Sarvam has... a Twitter account and a blog? Get your smartest people on camera daily. Make them influencers. Yes, it's ‘cringe’. Do it anyway.

3. Buy the hype you deserve

Those "organic" Silicon Valley hype cycles? You already know they cost millions. Stop being precious. Deploy ₹1Cr on strategic amplification. Seed Twitter. Pay influencers. Create FOMO. The best tech with the worst distribution equals failure.

4. Pick a fight

"Big AI doesn't understand when your mom mixes three languages in one sentence. We do." That's a story. "Support Indian AI" isn't. Make Google the villain. Make context-blindness the enemy. Give people something to rally against. Some bait. Please.

5. Ship experiences, not infrastructure

One viral consumer moment drives more enterprise leads than hundred cold emails. Ask Jasper. Ask Notion. Ask any AI company that matters. Or ask Ghibli.

Stop asking for support. Start demanding attention. Show us one thing — just ONE thing — that makes us go "Holy shit, only sarvam can do this."

Do that, and we won't just rally behind you. We'll evangelize for you.

Help us visualize why this matters to our lives, not our national pride or something. The market of dumbos like me is waiting.

[Live Law @LiveLawIndia]

J Oka: pls remeber one thing- you are not becoming a judge to become popular, I was harsh for only one reason , I wanted to uphold the principles of our Constitution

[Swapnil @Brahmonaut]

In the 2010s Naralikar, Dabholkar and 2 others(I think) ran a famous experiment through the paper Sakal. They devised a statistical test of astrology. They took horoscopes of the 100 scholarly students and 100 of those with learning difficulties. 1/

[Amit Paranjape @aparanjape]

A brilliant scientist, a great teacher, a prolific writer (sci-fi and science - in English and Marathi), a mentor, an amazing institution builder (he helped create @IUCAAstro), and more!

Just like the great Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan, #JVN made science fun and easy to understand - through his lectures, his science books, his sci-fi books and more.

Those who grew up in the 1980s will remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos show, which aired on Doordarshan on Sundays - along with a preview commentary by Dr. Jayant Narlikar.

More recently he had also started a blog: https://t.co/8Q1ediJf6P ...I was fortunate to meet him last year to discuss this initiative, along with a few friends. We pushed him write short stories, memories and more. And he obliged! Do checkout this blog.

(photo from 2024, with @NGKabra )

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200k/year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

Thanks to fearmongering influenzas, the word “processed” has turned into “poison” in the minds of average folks. This is unfortunate. We won’t have modern human civilisation without food processing.

How Machines Transform Food: The Science of Food Processing
https://t.co/THcaHomeJN

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Fair chance that Deep Research by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google will only get worse over time: not because LLMs will get worse, but because valuable data for any decent analysis will NOT be on the open web.

Paywalls are coming to lock away quality stuff. Even now I can see it:

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

This is proof of how there is no “best advice.”

The below is true for plenty of ppl - and helpful advice - but also false for others.

Some levels are impossible to get to without tenure. Eg Satya Nadella ignored this advice for 22 years and went from new grad to Microsoft CEO.

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

This is a great question, and one of the answers is a great secret that explains a huge amount of how the world works.

First: We have been cooking food for a long time to free up calories that would otherwise be unavailable. We’ve been doing this long enough that it as affected our physiology.

But the second answer is the big one: Humans are able to behave as if our lives are extremely valuable. Deer and coyotes and pigeons and hawks and bears drop like flies. They die constantly. Humans have the ability to not accept this and so we do all kinds of crazy things to prevent ourselves from puking or shitting our brains out or dying.

We’re perfectly capable of eating and digesting raw meat, but we do not do it because we have the ability to make a different decision that decreases the amount of time we spend suffering.

[Sugandha @sugandhanisa]

NRIs who move back should stop pretending that they do it to "contribute to the country" or fix the system etc. Everyone knows the reasons to stay out of India as well as the reasons to come back. It's a personal choice you make for yourself, nothing less & certainly nothing more

[Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct]

Many “anti-DEI” legal immigrants who celebrated Trump are now realizing that “America first” is fundamentally incompatible with their dreams of “global meritocracy”.

And that Trump’s core base is comprised of people who find their presence in America to be rather undesirable.

[Akshay Oka @M42Fan]

@soorajchandran_ Also Indians tend to visit similar countries (Ger, Austria etc) in one trip, so obviously things look similar. Also restrictions/preferences in diet, art, music, activities insulates Indians from experiencing the nuances in local european customs.

[Akshay Oka @M42Fan]

Early career jobs being unpaid (or worse) on pretext of "learning" is ridiculous. By this logic, every job should be unpaid as there are always learnings regardless of role/exp. A degree being paid is different as it involves only consumption, not labor benefiting the provider

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Update: I am looking for a chief of staff for myself.

[शिक्षित बेरोज़गार @kaul_vivek]

Real estate, data, stories, and stories that sound like data.

Or how the storification of real estate hurts.

Or why people prefer stories to data, when it comes to real estate.

Or what sounds like data in real estate, but really isn't.

This and more in the latest edition of the Easynomics newsletter.

https://t.co/iLLANWwgKk

[शिक्षित बेरोज़गार @kaul_vivek]

Real estate, data, stories, and stories that sound like data.

Or how the storification of real estate hurts.

Or why people prefer stories to data, when it comes to real estate.

Or what sounds like data in real estate, but really isn't.

This and more in the latest edition of the Easynomics newsletter.

https://t.co/iLLANWwgKk