Vipan Goel

Paranoids survive but happy ones thrive. Go J! I need to learn to suffer fools with equanimity, learning to suffer myself first -:)🥸

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

Food wouldn’t taste as good anymore.

[Nalini Unagar @NalinisKitchen]

Mumbai’s famous Gallops' food license suspended.

A40 year old restaurant has been shut after an FDA raid found blood and ketchup stains on ice, live cockroaches and ants in the kitchen, grease, water stagnation and raw material in damaged packaging.

This is not some roadside food stall. This is a well known restaurant at Mahalaxmi Racecourse.

If such basic hygiene can be ignored at a place like this, imagine what can happen in kitchens that nobody checks.

Restaurants can charge ₹500, ₹1,000 or ₹2,000 for a meal, but they can't even maintain basic hygiene.

If inspections are not done regularly, customers have no idea what is happening behind the kitchen door.

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@parrysingh @saffrontrail We have our own version too — “Meinu Kee?” 😄 Roughly: “Why should I care?”

Conducting a full-volume video call or having a shouting match with pals in a quiet public place, jamming the aisle before the plane comes to a stop, etc. weren’t even in the syllabus. 😂

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@parrysingh @saffrontrail We have our own version too — “Meinu Kee?” 😄 Roughly: “Why should I care?”

Conducting a full-volume video call or having a shouting match with pals in a quiet public place, jamming the aisle before the plane comes to a stop, etc. weren’t even in the syllabus. 😂

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

History often shows that big movements begin with a single individual willing to challenge the status quo. Tukaram Mundhe’s actions in Maharashtra are a striking reminder of what one determined public servant can set in motion. 🇮🇳 🙏@Tukaram_IndIAS

[Tukaram Mundhe @Tukaram_IndIAS]

The most expensive part of a hospital bill may never touch the hospital at all.

A patient admitted for care has no way of knowing whether the price on a medical consumable reflects its actual cost or a markup fixed long before it ever reached the ward. That gap in information is, at its core, a public health issue.

A survey of hospital consumables in Maharashtra found an IV infusion set with a trade price of ₹11.05 carrying a printed MRP of ₹325 ; a markup of 2,841%. A syringe procured at ₹6.75 carried an MRP of ₹57.20. A catheter procured at ₹29.41 carried an MRP of ₹310.

These are not elective purchases. Patients cannot compare prices, seek alternatives, or question a number printed on a box while receiving care and the MRP itself is often fixed upstream by manufacturers and distributors, disconnected from the trade price by a wide, unexplained margin. The result is a system where the party bearing the cost has the least information to evaluate it.

The regulatory gap is structural: scheduled medicines are capped under the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013. Most medical devices and consumables are not leaving both the pricing and the information around it almost entirely unmonitored.

A review of these findings and clear guidelines on the permissible gap between trade procurement price and declared MRP have been recommended to the Department of Pharmaceuticals and the NPPA ; a step toward closing not just a pricing gap, but the information gap patients are left to bear alone.

#PublicHealth #GoodGovernance #Leadership #TukaramMundhe

https://t.co/Ye9CVzr8qU

[Tukaram Mundhe @Tukaram_IndIAS]

The most expensive part of a hospital bill may never touch the hospital at all.

A patient admitted for care has no way of knowing whether the price on a medical consumable reflects its actual cost or a markup fixed long before it ever reached the ward. That gap in information is, at its core, a public health issue.

A survey of hospital consumables in Maharashtra found an IV infusion set with a trade price of ₹11.05 carrying a printed MRP of ₹325 ; a markup of 2,841%. A syringe procured at ₹6.75 carried an MRP of ₹57.20. A catheter procured at ₹29.41 carried an MRP of ₹310.

These are not elective purchases. Patients cannot compare prices, seek alternatives, or question a number printed on a box while receiving care and the MRP itself is often fixed upstream by manufacturers and distributors, disconnected from the trade price by a wide, unexplained margin. The result is a system where the party bearing the cost has the least information to evaluate it.

The regulatory gap is structural: scheduled medicines are capped under the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013. Most medical devices and consumables are not leaving both the pricing and the information around it almost entirely unmonitored.

A review of these findings and clear guidelines on the permissible gap between trade procurement price and declared MRP have been recommended to the Department of Pharmaceuticals and the NPPA ; a step toward closing not just a pricing gap, but the information gap patients are left to bear alone.

#PublicHealth #GoodGovernance #Leadership #TukaramMundhe

https://t.co/Ye9CVzr8qU

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Jeff Bezos on why he calls the balance metaphor dangerous: "I don't even like the phrase work-life balance. I think it's misleading."

Bezos says he gets asked about work-life balance "all the time from both ends of the spectrum." His problem is with the word "balance" itself:

"It's not a balance... That's why that metaphor is so dangerous, because it implies there's a strict trade-off."

A balance suggests that every hour you give work is taken from home, and every hour at home is taken from work. Bezos sees the opposite.

He calls it "work-life harmony":

"If I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I'm adding value, part of a team... makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. And likewise, if I'm happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss, all the things."

In his view, each side keeps feeding the other, building momentum with every turn:

"It's a wheel. It's a cycle. It's a flywheel. It's a circle."

To show where the trade-off thinking fails, he describes someone who has all the time in the world for family but is miserable about work:

"You could be out of work, have all the time for your family in the world, but really depressed and demoralized about your work situation. And your family wouldn't want to be anywhere near you. They would wish you would take a vacation from them."

That's the danger: if you only count hours, you miss what actually matters. For Bezos, that's energy:

"There may be crunch periods where it's about the number of hours in the week, but that's not the real thing. Usually, it's about do you have energy, and is your work depriving you of energy or is your work generating energy for you?"

He points to something everyone has seen in a meeting:

"Some people come into the meeting and they add energy to the meeting. Other people come into the meeting and the whole meeting just deflates, and those people just drain energy from the meeting. And you have to decide which of those kinds of people you're going to be."

The same applies at home.

He admits hours can matter at the extremes:

"I suppose if you went crazy with, you know, 100 hours a week or something... maybe there are limits."

But @JeffBezos says he's never had that problem:

"I think it's because both sides of my life give me energy, and that's what I would recommend. That's what I do recommend to interns and execs."

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

NEWS: The irrepressible @Tukaram_IndIAS and his Maharashtra FDA team at it again! Ahead of Ganesh Chaturthi, approximately 10 tonnes of suspected fake paneer and around 5,000 kg of suspected adulterated khoya seized in a raid in Pune's Shukrawar Peth area. (next we need a bureaucrat with a spine who will break the neta-official-builder nexus👍🙏)

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This is the most powerful passage from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@j_bindra @airindia Off late, every time I fly Air India, I end up buying more of Indigo stock. They must get their act together or @IndiGo6E moat continues to widen and monopoly gets even stronger.

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@SahilBloom ‘And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.’ https://t.co/qY53zelOqN

[FBI Director Kash Patel @FBIDirectorKash]

CAPTURED: Another FBI Most Wanted Fraudster.

This is the 5th Most Wanted Fraudster captured since the creation of the new list three months ago – and yet another high value target captured overseas. Subjects captured so far have been responsible for a combined over $2 billion in fraud and were on the run for almost 4,000 days collectively prior to arrest.

MANJIT SINGH BEDI – on the run for nearly a year - was arrested for allegedly defrauding the U.S. of at least $600k in SNAP funds from approximately 2024 to 2025 – orchestrating a scheme out of a grocery store he operated here in the U.S. Bedi was just arrested in India and was believed have fled there sometime last year. FBI is actively working to secure his return to the United States.

Bedi is charged with a series of offenses including wire fraud, SNAP benefits fraud, and more.

Thank you to our law enforcement partners, the DOJ, the @WHFraudTF, and more who continue to work with us on this historic initiative under the leadership of @POTUS and @VP.
-DKP🇺🇸

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Thoughtful and interesting piece on Iran
https://t.co/SJpD9i0Qlg

[Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw @kiranshaw]

Why are we asking to fill in certificates for Ebola on arrival. No country is asking! @mea_gov_in_rbx

[🍀Louie Kerr 🇮🇪💚 @LouieKerr8]

😂

[Lee Kuan Yew Geopolitics! @LKYMM23]

Lee Kuan Yew to BBC:

If I was a ruthless man, I would get you in a corner and say now let ME ask you some questions. Why do you start with the assumption that your interviewee is always dumb and that you are smarter than him? Why do you assume that asians are somehow unable to understand western way of life and that they would be much better if they become more like the west?

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@AuthorGFAllen John le Carre

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

What exactly is being advertised here?

Delhi T1: a huge billboard selling cardamom seeds — with a private jet and celebrity endorsement.

Doesn’t this look like surrogate advertising.

@DelhiAirport @fssaiindia @MoHFW_INDIA @Tukaram_IndIAS

#SurrogateAdvertising

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

@Ike_Obiora I have experienced the same at Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports too. Super efficient.

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

EQ will continue to be the edge as AI blunts the IQ or be an equaliser for the humanity.

[Dylan Ratigan @DylanRatigan]

One cold, rainy morning in London, Richard Branson was late for an interview. I was working for Bloomberg. This was around 1999 or 2000, and we had set up beside the Thames, across from Parliament, to interview him live.
The crew was ready. The cameras were ready. Branson wasn’t there. We were getting close to airtime when my cell phone rang. It was one of those Nokia brick phones everyone carried then.
I answered.
“Dylan, where are you?”
It was Richard Branson.
Not his assistant. Not his publicist. Not somebody from Virgin.
Richard.
It turned out he was standing on the wrong side of the river. I told him where we were.
“Okay.”
A few minutes later, I looked across the bridge and saw Richard Branson running toward us through the rain.
Alone.
No assistant. No security. No entourage. No car waiting to carry him the few hundred yards to where we were standing.
Just a British guy in the rain who was late for an appointment.
He ran across the bridge. We did the interview.
And for some reason I have remembered it for more than twenty-five years.
As I think about Branson running across that bridge now, I’m increasingly interested in something else.
He seemed free.
There was something wonderfully inefficient about the whole thing.
Branson was late. He was on the wrong side of the river. He called me himself. Then he ran.
None of this was optimized.
A sufficiently well-organized billionaire could have had somebody else figure out where the television crew was. A driver could have been waiting. An assistant could have called an assistant. An entire infrastructure could have existed to prevent Richard Branson from ever having to run anywhere in the rain.
Instead, he behaved like a person.
That distinction seems more important to me today than it did then.
We are entering an extraordinary period in which artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of doing things we once believed were exclusively human.
Machines can write. They can speak. They can draw. They can reason. They can remember more than we can, calculate faster than we can and increasingly imitate the patterns of human conversation.
At the same time, much of our economic life has been moving human beings in the opposite direction.
We measure productivity. We optimize schedules. We automate interactions. We turn people into data points, customers into acquisition costs, workers into units of productivity and human attention into something that can be bought and sold by the second.
And now we are worried that machines are becoming too much like people.
Maybe we’re looking at only half the problem.
Machines can be like people only if people act like machines.
The Wrong Competition
If artificial intelligence can calculate faster than I can, there isn’t much point in my trying to calculate faster.
If it can search a million documents in the time it takes me to read a paragraph, I’m going to lose that contest too.
The same will increasingly be true of many forms of routine intellectual work.
So perhaps the answer isn’t to make ourselves more efficient versions of machines.
Maybe it’s to become more unmistakably human.
Curiosity. Humor. Judgment. Affection. Adventure. The willingness to change your mind. The ability to do something for no particularly rational reason other than that it might be fun.
Calling somebody yourself. Showing up wet. Being late. Running across a bridge.
These things can look like inefficiencies in a system designed to optimize everything.
But economics isn’t the entire question.
There is also the question of what kind of people we become.
I just thought it was funny that one of the most famous businessmen in the world had called my Nokia because he couldn’t find us and then came running across a bridge through the rain.
Today I think I understand a little better why I remembered it.
Richard Branson looked deeply human.
And in the world we’re entering, that may become more valuable, not less.@richardbranson @Virgin

[Vipan Goel @VipanGoel]

The seat belt signs and the moving plane be damned, we will grab our bags and then loiter around at the airport smoking and chewing khaini. 😀