Rangarathnam Gopu

Insatiably curious - Atyantakaama. Connoiseur of the commonplace. Rational Optimist. Heritage Economics Biology Poetry Cricket Books

[Āryāvarta @Indo__Aryan]

Muslims learnt numerals from Hindus and later it spread to Europe and other parts

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

To understand the depth and breadth of what Prime Minister Modi has achieved, we must remember what he inherited.

The Congress Party had a disastrous flirtation with Soviet style socialism (and the word "socialist" is still there in our Constitution, thanks to Indira Gandhi). With the Soviet collapse, India faced bankruptcy and the Congress switched to the Washington consensus, Davos-style globalism. To be fair to them, it looked reasonable in 1991, and people like me supported it, but far deeper thinkers like Gurumurthy saw that Davos globalism also as a dead-end. It met its end in the Global Financial Crisis 2008-9.

Modi's Swadeshi philosophy has achieved the balance of building up our capability while also earning the respect of the world. Like all great transformations, it takes time.

My prayers for his good health because so much work lies ahead 🙏

[GemsOfINDOLOGY @GemsOfINDOLOGY]

#GDPTrap #27
Baby formula milk vs neighbour’s breastfeeding circle

We shamed the neighbour who offered her breast when the new mother had no milk.
Now we pay ₹4,200 for a tin that promises “closer to mother’s milk” in Swiss font.

1960s: zero formula sales in rural India.
2025: infant formula market ₹42,000 crore. Nastlé, Danoöne, Aboutt laughing all the way to Zurich.

Your grandmother fed 11 children (hers + neighbours’) for 9 years straight. Cost: extra ₹22 on ghee.
Your wife buys 18 tins at ₹68,000/year so the tin says “DHA + ARA for brain development”.

Village women sat in a circle under the banyan.
One mother low on milk → three others took turns. Zero rupees, zero lectures.

Now lactation consultants charge ₹3,800/session to teach what instinct once did free.

India imports ₹18,000 crore worth of baby milk powder every year.
Same India that exports 22 lakh litres of breast milk to US preemies (yes, really).

We turned “dhoodu pila do” into a corporate supply chain.
Turned “japa maid ₹28,000/month” into mandatory expense.

Every “lactose-free” tin replaces a neighbour we ghosted.
Every “Stage 2 follow-up” is a tax on the circle we broke.

GDP goes up with every crying baby who never tasted human warmth.

By 2030 half of urban Indian infants will never know mother’s milk (or neighbour’s).
But the tin will have a gold seal.

Who got nourished?
The shareholder.

#GDPTrap #27

[Bitcoin Teddy @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Bill Maher asks how the government is “failing the poor so badly” when he pays “60 PERCENT” of his earnings in taxes.

“Last week was tax day… I paid the government probably almost 60% of what I earn. That’s a lot.”

“And I… wouldn’t mind if Bernie Sanders would stop saying the rich don’t pay taxes.”

“The top 10% pay 72% of all federal income taxes. And the bottom half, 3%.”

“The Democratic Socialists talk about socialism like we don’t already have a lot: Social Security, unemployment, Medicare, nutritional assistance, Medicaid, Obamacare, disability, housing subsidies.”

“How can you be soaking the rich and failing the poor so badly? How can it be that the federal government alone took in over 5 trillion in taxes last year, and we still need that?”

“Are we really this incompetent and corrupt?”

[Rangarathnam Gopu @WriterGopu]

@TamilHeritageTN TODAY (11-Jun, Thursday) is Day 1 of THT Indology Fest

5pm: Dr. Gowri Parimoo Krishnan delivers the opening note

5:30pm : Dr. Meenakshi Dubey speaks on Central India's prehistoric rock art

7pm: Dr Rajesh Singh speaks on Ajanta's narrative paintings

https://t.co/dJht2b96fZ

[Tamil Heritage Trust @TamilHeritageTN]

Tamil Heritage Trust invites nominations for The V Venkayya Epigraphy Award (VVE Award) 2026.

https://t.co/HtA2u9eqYS

(1/5)

[𑀓𑀺𑀭𑀼𑀱𑁆𑀡𑀷𑁆 🇮🇳 @tskrishnan]

Sangam verse Puranooru says

நெல்லும் உயிர் அன்றே; நீரும் உயிர் அன்றே;
மன்னன் உயிர்த்தே மலர்தலை உலகம்.

“Rice is not life by itself; water is not life by itself; it is through the king that the world blossoms”

The verse reminds us that while food and water are important to sustain life, it is good governance, leadership and vision that enable a nation to prosper and flourish. Congratulations to our PM @narendramodi ji for completing 4399 days in office making him as the longest serving PM in India.

[Pakistan Untold @pakistan_untold]

"Bengalis in East Pakistan used to call themselves Punjabis to evade Pak Punjabi army's genocide/ rape."

Bangladeshis, are you watching?

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: "Here is a man [Obama] talking about five different industries and none of which he has the slightest experience.

But because he has these degrees from the places you mentioned, and people have told him how clever he is, he now thinks he can do this.

Intellectuals of the green/environmental movement see themselves as the wise and noble, forcing the rest of us poor dummies to do what's right.

They are driven to power due to their ego, pride, and vanity."

(This was pre-Solyndra.)

[Parimal @Fintech03]

S. N. Bose, 1 of the architects of modern physics, playing the esraj for P. C. Mahalanobis, the pioneering statistician, on the occasion of a wedding anniversary. A beautiful reminder that great minds often spoke not only through science, but also through music.

[Anurag @Jhunjhunuwala_]

PM Indira Gandhi

>1974 inflation: 28.6%
>1976 top income tax rate: 97.5%

>By 1981, India had accumulated the largest IMF loan in the Fund's history.

>And yesterday marked 60 years since the biggest rupee devaluation in Indian history, when the rupee was slashed by 37% against the US dollar on 6/6/66.

It's perfectly fine to hold that opinion.
You deserve Gandhi's ruling you again.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Saying this once again: the Dronacharya Award should go to both his parents.

[Aravind @aravind]

Basically, in just 12 years, India has done or exceeded what was achieved in the last 60 years. India will be able to reap the benefits of all this work only in the coming decades. And only if there's political stability. That's why the adversaries are earnestly attacking now.

[Lalitāditya @LalitAditya1212]

It isn't a coincidence that:

- Sindh, Gandhara, Bengal etc were Buddhist dominated places; and

- these are Muslim majority now.

Sindh and Gandhara actually converted totally from Buddhism to Islam in 2-3 generations.

On the other hand, the nearby Kutch (bordering Sindh) had strong Hindu resistance. The adjacent Gujarat proper never converted even after Islamic rule.

Even after centuries of Islamic rule, the Gangetic heartland, Rajputana, the Deccan etc remained overwhelmingly Hindu.

This is why India retained a continuous civilizational thread; regions like Sindh and Gandhara lost theirs almost entirely.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The standard narrative taught in global textbooks creates a massive logical blind spot: it confuses the origin of a word with the origin of the science itself. To be absolutely clear on the facts: the linguistic etymology is correct, the word "algebra" undeniably comes from the Arabic al-jabr via al-Khwārizmī’s 9th-century book. But al-Khwārizmī did not invent the mathematics.

~200 yrs before al-Khwārizmī wrote his book in Baghdad, the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta published the Brahmasphuta Siddhanta (The Correct Treatise of Brahma). Brahmagupta’s work was a mathematical revolution. He established the structural rules of algebra that we use today:

- Brahmagupta was the 1st to formalize 0 as a number in eqns, defining rules like A - A = 0 & explaining how zero interacts with (+)ve & (-)ve numbers.

- He introduced the concept of (-)ve numbers, calling (+)ve numbers fortunes (dhana) & (-)ve numbers debts (rina) & laid out the algebraic rules for multiplying them (e.g., a debt times a debt is a fortune).

- He gave the world the 1st explicit algebraic formula to solve quadratic eqns (ax^2 + bx = c).

In the 8th century, the Abbasid Caliphate established the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad. They realized that Indian mathematics was centuries ahead of the rest of the world. Around 773 CE, an Indian astronomer & mathematician traveled to Baghdad bringing sanskrit texts, including Brahmagupta’s treatise. The Caliph ordered these texts to be translated into Arabic. This translated work became known in the Arab world as Al-Sindhind (a direct phonetic corruption of the Sanskrit Siddhanta).

Al-Khwārizmī sat in Baghdad with access to Al-Sindhind. He absorbed the Indian decimal system, the use of zero & the algebraic methods of solving eqns. When he wrote his famous book, he was systemizing these Indian methods into a textbook format for an Arabic-speaking audience. In fact, al-Khwārizmī wrote another book explicitly titled Kitāb al-Jamʿ wat-Tafrīq bi-Ḥisāb al-Hind (The Book of Addition & Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation).

While the Arabic word al-jabr means restoration of broken parts, the ancient Indian Sanskrit word for algebra is far more philosophically & logically profound: Bīja-gaṇita.

Bīja means seed/element.
Gaṇita means calculation.

Indian logicians like Bhāskara II (who later wrote a definitive text titled Bīja-gaṇita) explained that arithmetic deals with visible, known quantities, but algebra deals with the hidden seed, the unknown variable (x). Just as a giant tree is hidden inside a tiny, invisible blueprint within a seed, the final answer of a complex universe is hidden inside the unknown variable of an algebraic eqn.

[Bitcoin Teddy @Bitcoin_Teddy]

MARC ANDREESSEN: "We had meetings with the Biden admin where they told us to not even start AI companies because there's no way they'll let them succeed."

JOE ROGAN: "What do you do after a meeting like that?"

MARC ANDREESSEN: "You go endorse Donald Trump."

LMAO

[Rishi Bagree @rishibagree]

CJP Youth : Modi Govt is not giving us jobs.
I am a BCom graduate, but yet to find a job.

Journalist : What is the full form of BCom ???

Youth : #$%&@

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Exactly 102 yrs ago today, on June 4, 1924, a 30 yr old, virtually unknown Indian reader at Dhaka University walked down to the post office & mailed a short, 5 page manuscript to Albert Einstein.

Satyendra Nath Bose was in a bind. He had just completed a paper titled “Planck’s Law & the Light Quantum Hypothesis,” which he had written after making a literal mathematical error on a classroom blackboard while teaching his students. Instead of treating quantum particles like separate, individual entities (the classical Western approach), his mistake treated them as completely indistinguishable: they lost their identities & bled into 1 another.

He had sent the paper to the prestigious Philosophical Magazine in England, but the editors summarily rejected it. Convinced his logic was flawless, Bose took a massive gamble. On June 4, 1924, he slid the manuscript into an envelope along with a cover letter that began with the lines: “Respected Sir, I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal & opinion..." He addressed it to Albert Einstein in Berlin.

When Einstein opened the letter a few weeks later, he did not just read it, he was stunned. He realized this young Indian scholar had solved a foundational contradiction in quantum theory that had blocked European physics for yrs. Einstein personally translated the paper into German, had it published & used Bose’s math to predict a brand-new state of matter: the Bose-Einstein Condensate.

Yrs later, when the brilliant British physicist Paul Dirac formalized the mathematics of these subatomic particles that love to flock & share the exact same space, he gave them a permanent name in honor of the man who dropped that letter in the mail on June 4th: Bosons.

Fast forward a few decades, Paul Dirac, comes to India to visit him. The 2 physicists prepare to leave for an academic function. Bose, operating with typical Indian hospitality, invites a massive crowd of his eager postgrad students to come along.

As they walk outside, Dirac looks at the modest, compact car parked at the curb, then looks at the crowd of students & freezes. Dirac, utterly distressed by the spatial chaos, taps Bose on the shoulder & says "Satyen, this is highly illogical & impractical. There are far too many people for this vehicle. There is simply no room left."

Bose looks straight at Dirac & says: "Oh, come now, Paul! We believe in Bose statistics here! Do not you remember? An infinite number of Bosons can occupy the exact same state simultaneously!"

[Historianunkil @SudsG5]

In 1990, the NYT published an oped that said *Pol Pot is not the real enemy, Vietnam is*.

Why? Because Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop a genocide and then appealed to the UN for humanitarian aid to feed millions of starving cambodians. The US vetoed this and backed Pol Pot!

[Dr. Deepessh Divaakaran (Dr. DD) @md_deepesh]

India has been running a scam on itself for 35 years.
Not the West's scam.
Ours.

Designed elsewhere.
Approved here.
Celebrated everywhere.

1991.
India called it Liberalization.

The newspapers called it reform.
The economists called it courage.

History may call it something else.

Because almost nobody read the fine print.

The real deal was never written in a budget speech.

India would export its brightest minds.
West would keep the ownership.
India would keep the applause.

And everyone would call it progress.
The handshakes were signed.
The champagne was poured.

The story began.

IITs expanded.
Campuses grew.
Taxpayer money flowed.

Generation after generation was trained.
Not to build Indian technology empires.
But to become the world's most reliable technology labour force.

America noticed something before India did.
The Indian mind was the most valuable raw material on Earth.

More valuable than oil.
More valuable than rare earth minerals.
More valuable than factories.
And most loyal too.

So they took it.
Legally.
Cunningly.
At industrial scale.

IIT graduates landed in Silicon Valley.
They wrote the code.
Designed the systems.
Built the servers.
Engineered the chips.
Created the platforms.

India supplied the brains.
West kept the products.
West kept the patents.
West kept the power.

Then came the second act.
The twist nobody talks about.

The same technology came back home.
The same code.
The same servers.
The same platforms.
The same dependency.

Only, now it arrived wearing a different costume.

Digital India.
Cloud Revolution.
AI Transformation.

NTT.
Japan.
18 facilities.
~265 MW.

STT GDC.
Singapore.
30 Locations.
~390 MW.

AWS.
America.
5 Locations.
~900 MW.

Google.
America.
~1000 MW.

Microsoft.
America.
~500 MW.

The biggest names in global data infrastructure.
Planting flags across India.

Now comes the uncomfortable part.

The hardware?
Not ours.

The operating systems?
Not ours.

The foundational AI models?
Not ours.

The cloud infrastructure?
Not ours.

The laws governing much of it?
Not ours.

The CLOUD Act 2018.
A law passed in Washington.
With consequences far beyond Washington.

If an American company owns the platform,
America can demand access under its laws.

The server location becomes secondary.
The ownership becomes everything.

And while all this was happening...

Ribbon cuttings continued.
Press conferences continued.
MoUs continued.
Awards continued.

This is the circular model nobody wants to discuss.

Fund the education.
Export the talent.
Let west build the platforms.

Import the platforms.
Pay annual fees forever.

Rename the dependency.
Call it sovereignty.

35 years: No sovereign operating system.
35 years: No globally dominant Indian chip platform.
35 years: No foundational AI Ecosystem.

But we became experts at celebrating consumption.
Experts at rebranding dependency.
Experts at confusing usage with ownership.

The British took the cotton.
And sold back the cloth.

This time we shipped the brains.
Then bought back the intelligence.
On subscription.

History has a cruel sense of humour.

Sometimes a nation loses its sovereignty through invasion.

Sometimes it signs it away.
Then calls it reform.