Padma Shri for K. Pajanivel, the Man Who Kept India’s 5,000-Year-Old Silambam Tradition Alive
K. Pajanivel, renowned Silambam master and dedicated promoter of India’s ancient martial arts tradition, will be honoured with the Padma Shri for his exceptional contribution to preserving and popularising indigenous martial arts and folk culture.
Hailing from Puducherry, he has devoted over three decades to training thousands of students in Silambam and other traditional martial and folk art forms, while actively promoting Tamil Nadu’s 5,000-year-old weapon-based martial art across India and internationally.
Through free training camps, cultural programmes, and grassroots mentorship, he has played a vital role in keeping India’s rich martial heritage alive for future generations.
Pajanivel supports teaching Silambam in schools and aims to further promote it globally. His work has been vital in keeping India’s rich martial heritage alive for future generations.
Credit : Hindustan Times.
In 1943, the Gestapo finally caught Raymond Aubrac — one of France's most wanted Resistance leaders. He was sentenced to death. His execution was days away.
His wife Lucie was six months pregnant.
Most people would have hidden. Would have grieved quietly and prayed for a miracle. Lucie Aubrac did something else entirely. She obtained forged identity papers, constructed a cover story, and walked straight into the office of Klaus Barbie — the man history would remember as the Butcher of Lyon — and convinced him to grant her a visit with the condemned man.
She wasn't there to say goodbye.
She was memorizing guard positions. Counting minutes. Mapping the route the prison truck would take.
On October 21, 1943, that truck rolled through the streets of Lyon carrying Raymond and other prisoners toward what should have been the end. Lucie had spent weeks quietly assembling a team of Resistance fighters, planning an ambush with the precision of a military operation. When the truck reached the ambush point, the team struck — fast, coordinated, and without hesitation.
In the chaos of gunfire and confusion, Raymond Aubrac was pulled free.
Lucie — visibly, unmistakably pregnant — had organized every detail of his liberation.
They went into hiding. Weeks later, Lucie gave birth to their daughter in a safe house while German forces searched for them across France. When liberation finally came, the Aubracs didn't merely survive — they rebuilt.
Raymond became a celebrated engineer and entered public life. Lucie became a historian, pouring decades into ensuring that the women of the French Resistance — so often unnamed, so easily forgotten — were written permanently into the record. They raised three children. They traveled the world. They argued and laughed and grew old together.
When journalists asked Lucie, years later, what had compelled her to risk everything that October day, she didn't hesitate.
"He was my husband. What else would I do?"
Lucie Aubrac passed away in 2007 at the age of 94. Raymond — who had once needed a commando team to be freed from a German prison — lived on until 2012, reaching 97 years old. In his final years, he continued speaking publicly about the Resistance, about memory, about the obligation to tell the truth.
They had been married for 64 years.
Not a love story built on grand gestures or perfect circumstances. A love story built in occupied France, in safe houses and forged documents and a prison truck ambush on a Lyon street — forged in fire, and never broken.
True love doesn't wait for rescue. Sometimes, it does the rescuing
Train driver switches from high beam to low to help train coming in the opposite side. Only roads are filled with idiots using high beam.
IG - vsg_railfan
Watch this clip of 30 seconds.
Home Minister Amit Shah demolished years of propaganda of the likes of Suzanne Arundhati Roy, Kanhaiya Kumar, Nandini Sundar, Nivedita Menon, Human Rights Organisations and Naxal sympathiser Gang of JNU in four sentences.
"When naxal girls were rehabilitated by us as part of the rehabilitation program run by certain NGOs and voluntary organisations, the young girls used to weep tears of joy while putting on nailpolish, mehendi as they had not enjoyed this luxury ever."
"Grown men while meeting their parents, would start fighting with them, blaming them for destroying their life &future by keeping them in the custody of naxals."
Amit Shah : "It is very convenient to talk about the human rights of Urban Naxals sitting in AC premises, writing articles on them or in universities with police protection, but one should visit these rehabilitation camps to fully comprehend that your baseless prejudiced support for the urban naxals, destroyed the lives of more than 15000 young kids."
You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers.
Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells.
The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.
When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside.
The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow.
A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born.
And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.
🚨LONG POST.
In the last five years, the Modi Government has faced four externalities. That's one every fourteen months, on average. This government has now seen four of its budgets go for a toss (2020, 2021, 2022, and 2026).
In March 2020, we had the pandemic and a complete national lockdown, unprecedented in the Indian context. Contraction of the economy, stress on the medical infrastructure, and do recall how we overnight became global exporters of medical equipment. Despite what the West said, we ensured two billion vaccine doses in record time.
Across 2021-22, you had the global supply chain crisis. Automobile plants were shutting down everywhere in the world, and a new war for semiconductors began. Five years later, we are getting chip assembly underway and collaborating with critical stakeholders in the sector.
Meanwhile, our PLI initiative, put into hyperdrive mode because of the pandemic and China, is yielding results. To give you one example, our smartphone exports to the US have gone from zero four years ago to more than $20 billion.
In 2022, you had the Russia-Ukraine war, and double-digit energy prices did not reach our shores because we were pragmatic in our energy choices. Despite sanctions and sermons from the West, our crude imports from Russia went from zero to 40% at its peak, and in February 2026, it was 20% of our total imports, with the differential narrowing.
And now, we have the West Asia war. Call it the Covid of energy supply chains, and people are again panicking, as they did in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The opposition is having a field day because panic suits their politics, but our economy is far more resilient than they would like to believe.
No government can prepare for a virus, a chip crisis, a war in some other part of the world, and the shutting down of Hormuz. It's been less than ten days since the Hormuz has been shut, and the average time taken by a tanker to reach India from Russia is 20-35 days. This is how fast the world is moving right now.
Draw a cue from 2020, 2021, and 2022. The crisis has hit us, like several other countries, but we'll come out better. Trust the processes. This is not a political problem, but an economic one, and the solution will also be driven by economic thinking. We have done this before, and we'll do it again.
There is a persistent narrative in public discourse that the Indian middle class is subjected to a uniquely predatory tax regime.
However, when we strip away the anecdotes and look at the hard data across G20 economies, a completely different picture emerges.
We must look at the "Prosperity Multiple", the ratio of the tax-exemption threshold to Per Capita GDP. This metric reveals the true fiscal entry point for a citizen relative to the nation's average income.
In the developed world (the so-called "Global North"), the fiscal philosophy is explicitly designed to widen the tax base as early as possible.
- In the United States, the state begins taxing citizens when they earn just ~18% of the average national income.
- In the UK, the threshold is ~28%. Essentially, these economies operate on a model where if you are earning a living wage, you are paying income tax. The net is cast wide and deep.
The Indian Outlier
Contrast this with India. The data shows India is a massive statistical outlier, standing at 5.32x.
India is the only G20 economy that allows its citizens to earn more than five times the per capita GDP before they enter the direct tax net.
The gap between India (#1) and Argentina (#2) is not just a margin; it is a structural chasm.
To contextualise this for an international audience: If the United States adopted India’s tax threshold ratios, an American citizen would not pay a single dollar in income tax until they earned approximately $476,000 annually.
The Strategic Choice
This is not an accident of policy, but a deliberate macroeconomic choice.
While the standard prescription from global rating agencies has always been to "broaden the base" (tax people earlier), India has resisted this dogma.
Instead, the policy focus has been on shielding the purchasing power of the aspiring middle class.
By keeping the fiscal entry point exceptionally high, the Indian state effectively leaves 100% of disposable income in the hands of the vast majority of earners.
This fuels the consumption cycle that drives our growth.
It is easy to get lost in the noise of domestic debate. But the data is clear: no other major economy in the world provides this level of relative income shielding.
We are not just holding the line on tax relief; we are arguably the most protective regime in the G20 for the entry-level earner.
It is time we evaluate our economic structures based on evidence, not inherited narratives.
Watch closely - you are seeing something that shouldn't be humanly possible. In these final minutes, Shatavadhani Dr. R. Ganesh is presenting a poem he composed entirely in his head while being interrupted by 100 different people for 3 days. Without a single scrap of paper, he recites every single verse in a flawless, lightning-fast stream. It’s like watching a grand master play 100 games of chess at once and winning every single one with a checkmate in the final second!
Shatavadhana is the ultimate "brain-gymnastics" of ancient India. It is the incredible art of dividing your mind into a hundred different channels at the exact same time. The performer has to compose beautiful poetry, solve complex math puzzles, and crack jokes- all while people are trying to distract and confuse them. It is the world’s most extreme test of focus and memory, proving that when the mind is truly trained, its power is absolutely limitless.
Not a Minister on a chair. A Swayamsevak on the floor. ❤️🪷
He was invited as a Union Minister to inaugurate the event. Chairs were ready. Protocol was in place. But when the Pancharatna Keerthanam began, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat didn’t look for the stage or the seat.
He quietly removed his footwear, stepped down, and sat on the floor like any ordinary listener, fully absorbed in the music.🤍🔥
At Palakkad’s Tapasya Kala Sahitya Vedi Golden Jubilee International Music Festival, what I witnessed was not a minister — but an RSS Swayamsevak in his truest form.🚩
Some moments don’t need slogans.
They explain everything on their own. 🪷
@musing_monica What happened to all the folks recommending renting on all financial forums and groups. Isn't renting way cheaper than EMI with the ease of relocation when job changes?
What makes this Belur (Chennakesava) temple panel unique is that it is a highly complex, multi-layered narrative relief framed within an ornate arch (torana), filled with an astonishing number of miniature figures, dancers, musicians, animals, yalis, and divine attendants. The central niche shows a divine couple seated in a formal setting, flanked by attendants, while the surrounding space is packed with dynamic flying figures, scrolling foliage, elephants and mythical creatures carved in very high relief.
Its uniqueness lies in three important aspects:
1. The Hoysala sculptors achieved extreme depth and movement within a very narrow stone panel, creating a three-dimensional effect without breaking the slab.
2. The composition combines mythological symbolism with courtly life, showing not just gods but also musicians, dancers, warriors and animals in natural poses.
3. The detailing is so fine that even jewellery, facial expressions and textile patterns are visible — something rarely matched in Indian stone sculpture.
This panel is considered a technical and artistic masterpiece of Hoysala craftsmanship, showing both narrative richness and unmatched stone-carving skill.