Abhishek Merukar

An IT professional and aspiring Marathi filmmaker.

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

My film now available on Prime video!!

https://t.co/1kc8IBWqHt

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

I've noticed that one of the most common mistakes ambitious people make is believing that happiness is waiting on the other side of achievement.

In behavioral science, we call this the arrival fallacy. It's the idea that once you reach the next milestone, get the promotion, earn the recognition, or accomplish the goal, you'll finally feel fulfilled.

But satisfaction doesn't come from arriving. It almost always comes from making progress toward something meaningful. That's why goals are important, but they are not the reward. The pursuit is.

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@chiragbarjatya The wooden temple at Pattaya is brilliant!

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@amhiraigadkar @oradlaski ज्यांच्या घरी 2-4 पाहुणे हक्काने राहायला येतात, ते खरे श्रीमंत!

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

100%, I always disagree with this "Singapore is expensive" myth that comes from few expats who live in pricey bubbles. All 3 daily meals easily under $15 total, cheap transport and sports facilities, safety. Compare it to the likes of London. Sydney, LA, NY, Paris and you'd know.

[Bluebird @abigbluebird]

That’s why I’ve never got the whole ‘Singapore is expensive’ stereotype, especially when it comes from locals.

Singapore is expensive for expats, given that they have to rent private housing, are subject to expensive international school fees for their children etc.

But for locals? In relation to the average salaries, it’s far cheaper than our neighbours and other global cities.

[The Kaipullai @thekaipullai]

I took an Uber ride today, where the driver took a wrong turn and gave me some twenty extra minutes to go into a historical wormhole

It goes somewhat like this

The concept of Uber became possible because of Google Maps.

Google Maps works because of GPS

The GPS that powers Google maps, became available for us civilians, because Ronald Reagan opened it up after the Soviets shot down an off-course Korean Air flight 1983, killing 269 people.

But GPS as a concept traces its origins to John Hopkins institute where two bored researchers built something to track the Sputnik satellite. While doing that, they accidentally stumbled onto the concept that evolved into what we call, the GPS.

And the Sputnik that they were tracking in Space?

Well, it was able to go into Space because of the efforts of many Nazi German Rocket Engineers, who were kidnapped by the Soviets, post Nazi German defeat in WW2. They were the ones who built the rockets which launched the Sputnik into orbit.

And how did the Nazis know so much about rockets?

That happened because Nazis and Hitler went all in on rocket technology, when they realized that they couldn't win WW2 conventionally and they needed some extraordinary weapons to win the war.

But why did they go to war in the first place?

Because the Nazis and Hitler, wanted to avenge their humiliation in WW1.

And Why did WW1 Start?

It started because a Serb decided to assassinate the Crown Prince of Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated the entire conflict.

Hope you realize, how so many things had to come together, so that in 2026, we can hail a cab to our doorstep thru a mobile phone.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your brain is built to forget almost everything that happens to you. It makes one exception, and you're looking at it.

Carole Peterson at Memorial University has spent over 25 years studying our earliest memories. She found that the first one most adults can recall comes from age 2.5, not 3.5 as the old textbooks said. The early memories that survive share three things: a strong feeling, a new experience, and a physical sensation. A wave, a dad's grip, and the weird feeling of riding a board check every box.

The mechanism lives in the amygdala. It's the brain's emotion sensor, sitting right next to the hippocampus, the part that files memories. When something big happens, the amygdala triggers a flood of stress hormones like cortisol. That's the signal to the hippocampus to file this one extra deep. James McGaugh at UC Irvine spent his career showing this works for happy moments too. The amygdala fires for pleasure the same way it fires for fear. What matters is how loud the feeling is.

Dads play a particular role here. Daniel Paquette, a developmental psychologist in Montreal, has spent 20 years researching what he calls the "activation relationship." Moms tend to be the safe base kids come back to. Dads tend to be the door to the outside world. They push kids into new and slightly scary situations, and stand right there as the safety net. Kids who grow up with this kind of dad end up more confident, less anxious, and more comfortable around strangers.

A 2017 review pulled together 16 studies covering 1,521 father-child pairs. Quality rough-and-tumble play, which means the wrestling and tossing and chasing kind, was linked to lower aggression, better emotion regulation, and stronger self-control. In rats, baby animals that don't get to play-fight grow up with an under-developed prefrontal cortex, which handles planning and impulse control.

Christina Bethell's 2019 study in JAMA Pediatrics took the long view. Her team at Johns Hopkins surveyed 6,188 Wisconsin adults about their positive childhood experiences. Adults reporting six or seven of those had 72 percent lower odds of adult depression than those reporting zero to two. The effect held even for people with serious childhood trauma. Good moments keep paying out for decades.

The original tweet is right. The moments that burn in are the ones with big feelings, new physical sensations, and an adult who is the bridge between safe and scary. Twenty years from now, the grip is what he'll remember.

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@RanvirShorey @elonmusk Doesn't sound right Ranbir. Elon is not a filmmaker, merely an audience. And audiences have the right to react to a film.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

What you avoid controls you; what you face frees you.

[Rahul Gandhi @RahulGandhi]

Muthu ji, your political views are your own - but please do speed up the returns on my investments. 😃

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@GabbbarSingh Panchang wohi nahi rehta! Promptly badla jata hai in such houses 😀

Largely applicable to the West, where visa, weather issues exist. Otherwise it's more balanced. Parents visit children every year for few months, explore the world, and bond with other parents they meet there.

[Daniel @danielholkss]

THEY SENT FOUR HUMAN BEINGS 452,000 KILOMETRES BEHIND THE MOON AND BROUGHT THEM BACK TO SPLASH DOWN IN THE EXACT SPOT THEY CALCULATED BEFORE THEY EVER LEFT THE GROUND

THE MATHEMATICS WORKED. THE PHYSICS HELD. THE SILENCE ENDED.

EVERY ENGINEER, MATHEMATICIAN, PHYSICIST, AND PROGRAMMER WHO TOUCHED THIS MISSION IS THE COOLEST PERSON ALIVE AND THEY KNOW IT

WELCOME HOME

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

There’s an old Chinese saying that I love:

“The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@Nithin0dha Always bothers me when top students select economics and not medicine or engg or something that could really help humanity with a brilliant mind working on it.

[Nithin Kamath @Nithin0dha]

I recently had dinner with Dr Devi Shetty, the founder of Narayana Hospitals. For those who don't know him, he's the guy who figured out how to do open heart surgery for a few hundred dollars when the same procedure costs a bomb in the US. Narayana has 18,000 beds across India, and if you ask most middle-class people in Bangalore about it, they'll speak highly of it.

There was one thing I kept thinking about over and over again after meeting him.

Narayana's market cap is around ₹38,000 crore. Now compare that to pretty much any half-decent financial services business in India, and it'll be valued more than that, including Zerodha. A brokerage, worth more than a hospital chain, that has probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I get the arguments. If you're a fund manager/analyst, you can immediately explain it away using margins, capex, asset-light vs asset-heavy, and all that, and I'm not saying the market is wrong.

But it's still a strange world we've built, where the businesses closest to money get valued the highest, and the ones doing the hard and essential things get priced like boring utilities. A hospital carries physical infrastructure, enormous liability, thin margins and the actual weight of keeping people alive. And somehow that's worth less than a platform for buying and selling stocks.

I don't have a clean take on this. All of this just felt odd.

Ps: Nothing here is investment advice. For that, go to @zerodhavarsity

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@CoachDanGo Apple is one of the foods that I immediately feel hungry after eating, like in 15 minutes. Surprised to see that it lists in keeping hunger hormones in check.

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@GabbbarSingh Too soon to make that conclusion

[Abhishek Merukar @abhida]

@abdullah_0mar https://t.co/1kc8IBWYx1

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

A friend of mine used to say: "Confidence isn’t built by thinking positive thoughts. It’s built by doing difficult things while your brain screams at you to stop."

Damn, was he right.

[Amit Paranjape @aparanjape]

Street dogs attack, kill woman in Pune’s Chakan

The woman was walking alone, when, all of a sudden, six to seven street dogs attacked her

https://t.co/o3SFemuaaW