“Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it engages and exercises the brain. Today’s youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow’s leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active
— Richard Nixon
When your cat slowly shuts its eyes at you and opens them again, it is giving you the closest thing a cat has to a smile. Try it back. Narrow your eyes and blink slowly, and most cats will return the same slow blink. It even works on cats you have just met.
In 2020, scientists at two British universities had owners do exactly this. The cats blinked back far more than when they were ignored. In a second test, cats were even more willing to approach a total stranger who slow-blinked at them first. So you can try it tonight, from across the room.
Your cat also barely meows at other cats. Meowing is a sound it saves almost entirely for people. Kittens cry to their mother for food and warmth, and when cats moved in with humans, they kept right on crying, only now they aim it at us.
The purr is sneakier still. When a cat wants feeding, it tucks a high, thin cry inside the low rumble of its purr, pitched a lot like a crying baby. Scientists played that purr to people who had never owned a cat, and even they found it more urgent and harder to ignore. It leans on the same instinct a crying baby does.
That low rumble also sits at an unusual pitch, somewhere around 25 to 150 vibrations a second. It is the same low range used in medicine to help heal bone and ease sore muscles. It might be why a hurt or frightened cat purrs too, even though we usually read purring as a happy sound.
For an animal that curls up on your lap, your cat is barely tame. When scientists mapped house-cat DNA in 2014, they found it sits only a hair from a wildcat's, and the two can still breed. Dogs split from wolves more than thirty thousand years ago. Cats came to us much later and mostly on their own, drawn into the Middle East's first farming villages about ten thousand years ago by the mice in the stored grain. The oldest proof is a cat buried beside a person on Cyprus around nine and a half thousand years ago. The island had no cats of its own, so someone brought that one over by boat.
Offer your cat a spoonful of ice cream and watch it lose interest. Cats cannot taste sweetness at all. The gene for it broke millions of years ago, when cats became full meat-eaters, so the sweet part of your dessert never reaches them.
So the small, ordinary creature padding across your floor is a near-wild hunter that chose to live with us, grew a voice meant just for our ears, and tells you it feels safe by slowly closing its eyes.
You need to be slowmaxxing. You need to be reading long, fat books. You need to be making 48-hour chocolate chip cookies. You need to spend hours watching wildlife, you need to spend 15+ min making your coffee. You need to breathe in and breathe out. You need to be slowwwwwwwwww.
I feel HR team is that one team that doesn't gets affected by the AI because they can use it now to reject candidates just because the software told them. Sick
Heart → Daily walking
Brain → Reading & learning
Lungs → Deep breathing
Bones → Strength training
Blood → Drinking enough water
Skin → Daily moisturizing
Immune system → Quality sleep
Liver → Less junk & processed food
Gut → Probiotics & fiber foods
Eyes → Screen breaks every hour
Hands → Regular movement & stretching
Muscles → Enough protein
Nervous system → Less caffeine at night
Hormones → Stress management
Or just do strength training.
Warren Buffett has been filing his income tax returns from the age of 13. He is now 95. Not only he is filing returns for last 82 years, he has details and copies of all the 82 returns.
When I was in US, lot of my free time was spent in local library. For a voracious reader like me, the variety and volume of books available were feast to the brain.
That's when I first came across Warren Buffett. I think at that time he was the richest or second richest person on earth. And he built it from the scratch legally. I found it difficult to believe that someone can become richest person in the world purely through legal means. That created a huge impression in me.
I made what my auditor then considered as a weird decision. From the time I started accumulating wealth, I began giving all the information to income tax department. For a few lakhs of rupees wealth, I started submitting cash flow statement, Profit and Loss account and balance sheet along with my IT returns.
My current auditor came into my life around two decades ago. He was surprised when he saw my previous returns with this much details. I explained him why I needed it that way. He was also surprised that from every single bank transaction to all financial transactions were entered and maintained in Tally. I was also keeping in box files all back up papers for each financial year.
Within few years of our relationship, he not only implemented this model for his family but also to some of his willing clients.
After I got married, my wife found it very odd to file income tax returns like this. Convinced her and implemented the same for her too.
Time runs fast.
By God's grace, we are wealthy.
But the interesting part is right from my first income tax return to last year - not only I've records of all IT returns, I also have original statements and documents for all financial years. It's all there in tally too.
I don't have a single rupee of black money. More than investing, in which I'm still a novice, I learned lot of life lessons from Warren Buffett.
I don't want to claim any moral superiority. For many people, especially in developed nations, this practice is very normal. Being honest is probably considered abnormal only in our country.
From my life, I'm convinced that it is possible to become rich through legal means. I'm now 53. If God gives me say another 20 to 25 years of life, I'm confident of creating phenomenal wealth, that too purely through legal means.
Warren Buffett says it is very important as to who you have as role model in life. I've few role models in life and probably he was the first to join the list.
Role model matters.
Building significant wealth through legal means is 100% possible.
Snow leopards are so solitary that biologists never bothered creating a collective noun for them. No "pride." No "pack." They patrol territories up to 1,000 square kilometers alone across the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Tibetan Plateau.
So when CCTV catches them cuddling like house cats, there's a reason.
The tail is the key. Snow leopard tails reach nearly a meter long, almost the full length of their body, and they're thicker than any other big cat's tail because they store fat for both insulation and energy reserves. At 5,000 meters elevation where temperatures hit -40°C, a snow leopard wraps that tail around its face and body like a built-in scarf. What this footage is showing is communal thermoregulation: body heat pooling between animals whose fur already provides one of the most effective insulation systems in nature.
That fur runs up to 12 centimeters long on the belly. Double-layered: a soft woolly undercoat trapping warm air against the skin, coarser guard hairs on top blocking wind and snow. Their nasal cavity is wider and shorter than other cats', warming -40° air before it reaches the lungs. Paws are naturally oversized and fur-padded, distributing weight across deep snow like snowshoes. Metabolic rate runs higher than similar-sized cats, generating more body heat at rest just to survive the altitude.
Roughly 4,000 to 6,500 remain in the wild across 12 countries. Researchers who study them for years sometimes never see one in person. They're called the "ghost of the mountains" for a reason.
What you're watching is one of the loneliest animals on earth choosing not to be.