𝙉𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙡 𝙎

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶, '𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘯' 𝘪𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯...

[From the Hills of Nagaland. @Nagaland_India]

eureka 💡 📍Mizoram has got Train for the First time since India’s Independence

[𝙉𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙡 𝙎 @_nandulals_]

@grok @imSaichowdary_ Meanwhile @ChatGPTapp

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Seven years have passed sincen that great leap of Cristiano Ronaldo.

- @MonicaSaadeX

[Shazzam @callmeshazzam]

Chath...

[RVCJ Media @RVCJ_FB]

Ford rehires more than 300 veteran human engineers.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better

[Ayesha Awan @AyshahAwan]

#SaveWildlife
#ProtectHabitats #StopDeforestation
#HumanWildlifeConflict

[anand mahindra @anandmahindra]

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it.

It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing.

That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents.

So how does anyone make money on this?

Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province.

It wasn’t always there.

But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally.

Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container.

It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter.
His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking.

But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong.

His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi)

None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants.

Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table

I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear)

That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI.

I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006.

Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people..

But I admit that we need to think differently.

A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads

A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole.

I think that’s the work ahead of us now.

Not just more factories, and not just more parks.

Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood.

Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore.

We need to do it on purpose

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Japan never fails to impress.

[SriSathya @sathyashrii]

Absolutely 💯

[PIB India @PIB_India]

📢Direct Recruitment to various posts in Government of India

UPSC invites applications from eligible candidates for direct recruitment to various posts in Government of India

Visit👇

➡️Commission’s website: https://t.co/aMwviR0qsL

➡️Online Recruitment Application portal: https://t.co/udN6oaNnye

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

On this day in 1993, Jurassic Park was released in theaters

Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film revolutionized visual effects and became one of the highest grossing movies of its time, turning dinosaurs into a global phenomenon

[anand mahindra @anandmahindra]

“To beard the lion in his den.”

The dictionary defines it as boldly confronting a powerful rival on their own turf.

For years, Norway Chess has been Magnus Carlsen’s den. His turf. His domain.

So I woke up to this news and my jaw dropped.

You didn’t just win a title, @rpraggnachess.

You walked into the lion’s den and emerged victorious

This title is important. Not because of the trophy, but because of your challenger spirit.

And that’s something all of us can learn from…

🇮🇳👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

[Prasanth Chathannur @psnv1978]

10വർഷം കൊണ്ട് പിണു കോടികൾ സമ്പാദിച്ചു.
അന്തംകമ്മികൾ ഇന്നും, അടിമത്വത്തിൽ തന്നെ...😫

[Ministry of Culture @MinOfCultureGoI]

This 4,500-year-old terracotta dice from the Indus-Saraswati Civilization is a powerful reminder of India’s living heritage. Dicing is also mentioned as a popular game in Rig and Atharva Vedas (two of the four sacred Vedic scriptures).

From symbols and craftsmanship to rituals, yogic practices, and collective memory, numerous elements of ancient Indian civilization continue to thrive in the daily social and religious life of Indian society across regions and communities.

Civilizational inheritance is not just about geography or ruins, it is defined by living customs, symbols, rituals, and unbroken cultural consciousness. India is the enduring living continuity of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization.

#IndusSaraswatiCivilization #AncientIndianHeritage

[Tom Mathews Moolamattom @TMoolamattom]

ഫാസിസം തുലയട്ടെ 😛😛
കമ്മ്യൂണിസം വളരട്ടെ🤣🤣🤣

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

For a thousand years, the plains of northern India baked and starved between monsoons. Then one British engineer looked at the Ganges and saw not a river but a lifeline. Sir Proby Cautley's canal stretched 350 miles through the heart of India — and when its waters finally flowed in 1854, they fed millions who had known only famine.

[Rajasthan Royals @rajasthanroyals]

We have no words for you, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi 🔥

Baby Boss, FOR REAL! 💗😭

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

The sense of responsibility.
You can see how much one person's actions influenced everyone else to pause and start helping too.
if your car breaks down and you just wait around for help, no one will want to help you (entitlement) but if they see you pushing your car they will be more likely to help you.