एक अमीर महिला का दर्द सुनिए
"मैं भारत की टॉप अर्निंग पावर में आती हूं , मैं 40 % टैक्स देती हूं , मैं यहां इसलिए आई क्योंकि आज जो भी हूं मैं एजुकेशन के बदौलत हूं सबकों ये मौका मिले इसलिए मैं आज नहीं डर सकती हूं "
An Indonesian YouTube channel called Albumology has built a fascinating library of retro Hindi classics, reimagined in Reggae/Ska.
Using local Indonesian session musicians and vocalists, they’ve given these songs an entirely new cultural texture.
I came across this rendition of Neele Gagan Ke Tale in a post by @SHEKARSUSHEEL
I couldn’t stop playing it on loop.
It’s now downloaded and will become a permanent part of my road trip playlist.
The original, in the immortal voice of Mahendra Kapoor, is, of course, beyond comparison.
But this arrangement gives the song a universal feel. It’ll make you tap your feet, no matter where you come from.
And listening to the lyrics again, I was struck by how beautifully they celebrate the natural world. Long before sustainability became a global movement, this song was already reminding us of our bond with the planet. Perhaps it deserves to be an anthem for that cause.
#SundayWanderer
लक्ष्मी मुंडा उर्सलाइन स्कूल की दसवीं कक्षा की छात्रा है। आज सुबह वह रोज़ की तरह स्कूल गई थी। घर से निकलते समय उसका छोटा-सा घर और दुकान दोनों सुरक्षित थे। लेकिन दोपहर में जब वह पढ़ाई करके लौटी, तो देखी नगर निगम की टीम उसके घर और दुकान को तोड़ चुकी थी। जिस जगह सुबह तक उसका आशियाना था, वहां अब सिर्फ मलबा बिखरा पड़ा था।
लगातार हो रही बारिश में पूरा परिवार खुले आसमान के नीचे रहने को मजबूर है। लक्ष्मी की किताबें और कॉपियां बारिश में भीग रही हैं। सिर्फ कागज़ ही नहीं, उसके सपने भी भीग रहे हैं। वैज्ञानिक बनने का सपना देखने वाली यह होनहार छात्रा आज अपने भविष्य को लेकर पूरी तरह टूट चुकी है। उसके चेहरे पर एक ही सवाल है- अब पढ़ाई कैसे होगी और सपने कैसे पूरे होंगे?
लक्ष्मी की मां सरिता मुंडा सदमे में हैं। वह बार-बार बेहोश हो जा रही हैं। आंखों में आंसू लिए वह बताती हैं, "मेरी मां भी मोरहाबादी के इसी रजिस्ट्री ऑफिस के सामने रहती थीं। मेरी बेटी लक्ष्मी का जन्म भी यहीं हुआ। यही हमारा घर था, यही हमारी दुनिया थी। लेकिन आज बिना किसी नोटिस के हमारा घर और दुकान तोड़ दिया गया।"
सरिता कहती हैं कि उनके परिवार के पास रहने के लिए कोई दूसरी जमीन नहीं है। आज की रात कहां गुज़रेगी, बच्चों को बारिश से कैसे बचाएंगे और कल से रोज़ी-रोटी कैसे चलेगी? इन सवालों का उनके पास कोई जवाब नहीं है। मलबे के बीच खड़ी लक्ष्मी अपनी भीगी किताबों को समेट रही है, जबकि उसकी मां अपने उजड़े आशियाने को निहार रही है।
अब यह सिर्फ एक घर टूटने की कहानी नहीं है, बल्कि एक बेटी के सपनों, एक मां के संघर्ष और एक परिवार के भविष्य का सवाल है। उम्मीद बस इतनी है कि उनकी यह पुकार सरकार, नगर निगम और समाज तक पहुंचे, ताकि कोई आगे आए और लक्ष्मी के सिर पर फिर से छत और उसके सपनों को फिर से उड़ान मिल सके।
@HemantSorenJMM@DC_Ranchi
Pakistan Journalist: How long will South Asia see terrorism disseminating from Delhi, Kabul...
S Jaishankar: You're asking the wrong minister. Ask the minister of Pakistan, "how long". The world is not stupid. You can't confuse anybody anymore
Pak Jouno was trying to be smart; he had no idea who he was dealing with😂😂
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
Never ever ever stop being humble
If you’ve been blessed with a permanent roof, certainty of getting a decent cooked meal regularly and a family, you’ve made it big in your life 🙏
Be ambitious
Work hard for it too
And know life’s not the same for all🙏
India's Biggest Economic Challenge Is not Inflation, Oil, or War - It is an Unskilled Population Addicted to Distraction.
Every time oil prices rise, economists panic. Every time a war breaks out in the Middle East or Europe, television studios declare that India's economy is under threat. And yes, both matter. But neither represents India's greatest economic challenge. The real crisis is unfolding much closer to home.
It is a generation that spends more time consuming content than creating value. A workforce that debates geopolitics without mastering spreadsheets, artificial intelligence, coding, welding, precision manufacturing, sales, finance, communication, or even basic problem-solving. An economy where attention has become the most wasted national resource.
India is one of the youngest countries in the world. That should have been our greatest competitive advantage. Instead, we risk turning our demographic dividend into a demographic liability.
The Age of Endless Consumption
Never before has information been so accessible. Yet never before have so many people spent so much time learning so little. Hours disappear into political debates, celebrity gossip, cricket controversies, influencer reels, conspiracy theories, and outrage cycles that have absolutely no impact on an individual's earning potential. Ask someone how many hours they spent on social media last week. Then ask them how many hours they invested in acquiring a new professional skill. For many, the answer is uncomfortable. We have become experts at commenting on the economy while contributing very little to it.
Degrees Are Not Skills
India has no shortage of graduates. It has a shortage of employable graduates. Companies repeatedly report the same problem: vacancies exist, but suitable candidates are difficult to find. Not because people lack certificates. Because many lack practical skills. The world is rewarding competence, not credentials.
- Can you solve problems?
= Can you communicate effectively?
- Can you sell?
= Can you lead a team?
- Can you analyze data?
- Can you use AI to improve productivity instead of merely asking it amusing questions?
- Can you create something that another person is willing to pay for?
Those are the questions that determine economic success. Not the number of degrees hanging on a wall.
Attention Is the New Currency
The biggest theft today is not of money. It is of attention. Every notification fragments concentration. Every endless scroll delays mastery. Every hour spent consuming outrage is an hour not spent building expertise.
Modern economies reward deep work, specialized knowledge, creativity, and disciplined execution. Algorithms reward emotional reactions. Unfortunately, millions choose the algorithm.
The Coming Divide
Artificial intelligence is not replacing everyone. It is replacing people who refuse to learn. The future will belong to workers who continuously upgrade themselves. Those who combine human judgment with technological tools will become dramatically more productive. Those who stop learning will find themselves competing for fewer opportunities at lower wages. The divide will not be between rich and poor. It will increasingly be between skilled and unskilled.
National Growth Begins With Individual Discipline
Governments can build highways. Businesses can build factories. Universities can build campuses. But none of them can force an individual to develop skills. Economic transformation begins with personal responsibility. Spend one less hour arguing online. Spend one more hour learning. Read instead of scrolling. Build instead of complaining. Acquire one valuable skill every year. Become indispensable.
If millions of Indians made that simple choice, the country's economic trajectory would change more profoundly than any fiscal stimulus, any election promise, or any temporary fall in oil prices.
Wars will end. Oil prices will rise and fall. Markets will recover. But a nation that neglects skill development while surrendering its attention to endless distraction will struggle long after those headlines have disappeared.
The strongest economy is not built by the loudest voices. It is built by the most capable people.
#JaiHind