Balwant

Indian rediscovering Bharat....

[Balwant @balwant]

Cut out the noise & watch this podcast to understand impact of AI on IT companies business models &Indian IT in particular , Siddhant Bhandari of @persistencecap is a rockstar
Will AI kill the Indian IT Sector or Deep Value Opportunity? ( TCS & Inf... https://t.co/bBEjtj7rXW

[Balwant @balwant]

Real stars for India #athleticsgold, Salute to them and they deserve all the limelight #Kiran #Ramraj #machettira #prachi
#Asiangames

[The Khel India @TheKhelIndia]

Do Listen Folks! 🎧

Kiran, Machettira Poovamma, Vithya Ramraj and Prachi on winning first Gold for Indian in Athletics at Asian Games 2026! 🇮🇳🥇

They were pretty determined to win this Gold Medal, it’s was like do or die for them!

👏👏👏

[Balwant @balwant]

Wow #Vithyaramaraj pure class...real stars for India #asiangames

[Yuvraj Gokul @yuvrajsays]

Pure class! 🇮🇳

She definitely wasn’t in a Gold Medal position when she received the baton. But from there on, she proved she belongs to a different class.

What a finish! 🔥

Proud of all four. Proud of you, Vithya. ❤️

You made the difference! 🇮🇳🏆

[Anwar Ibrahim @anwaribrahim]

Guru mintak izin nyanyi kejap ok!

[Deepak Prabhu @ragiiing_bull]

Viraj Joshi, the grandson of Pt. Bhimsen Joshi takes us into the world behind the music. From his own journey as a Young Hindustani classical vocalist to cherished memories of his grandfather.
A legend in the making.

[भाषा सुंबली @bhashasumbli]

Go watch #hanumanansh ! @filmervishal जी की पूरी team के इस साहसिक, निष्ठावान और श्रद्धावान प्रयास की जितनी सराहना हो कम है ! सीताराम सीताराम! #jaihanumanji @HanumanAnsh

[Balwant @balwant]

Thank you @LeeKuanYimby for the observation , @Dev_Fadnavis @mieknathshinde please help on the cleanliness part and let this run as a focussed mission, if we can rejevevunate Mithi which is not impossible, you will be remembered in history in addition to the Infra success story

[Lee Kuan Yimby @LeeKuanYimby]

I was just in Mumbai, and I have to give them credit for the progress they’re making on infrastructure. The new Aqua Line metro is phenomenal. But the amount of work India still has to do on basic cleanliness and sanitation and it is hard to understand until you see it yourself. Would love for more westerners to go just to understand how wealthy they are, but that's a different point.

Mumbai is completely surrounded by water, yet there are almost no places where people can actually enjoy the water. The beaches are filled with trash, the water is badly contaminated, and almost nobody swims, even when it’s brutally hot outside. Walking on the beach is just mud and trash meeting filthy water on the horizon.

There are much poorer places around the world where people can still use the beaches. This is not just about money. India has gone decades without adequate trash collection, sewage treatment, or enforcement for a population of more than a billion people. At this point, the scale of the problem feels almost impossible, and the oceans around the world are paying the price for Indias garbage output as well.

I like the direction Modi is taking the country, but India needs to treat cleanup like a national emergency. Stop with the small campaigns and organize a full scale blitz.

Offer unemployed people paid work picking up trash, clearing drains and waterways, cleaning beaches, and maintaining public spaces. Give them proper equipment and supervision. Then build the collection and waste processing systems needed to stop everything from becoming filthy again a week later.

India has shown that it can build metros, airports, highways, and digital infrastructure. Clean streets and usable water should be treated as infrastructure too.

Mumbai should have one of the greatest waterfronts in the world. Instead, it's has basically an irrelevant feature of the city and feels surrendered to sewage and garbage.

[bhatnaturally  🇮🇳 @bhatnaturally]

Whenever I see harivana seve videos of Udupi mathadipatis I am reminded of this old video. A tearful watch for me and am sure many.

[bhatnaturally  🇮🇳 @bhatnaturally]

Wow! Vinay Varanasi has posted his entire show 'Pandharpur Mahima: The glory of Pandharpur' on YouTube. Apparently the hall was full and many could not enter. So he posted it free online. My relative's kids are part of the performance towards the end
https://t.co/wwjFLk2UL2

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

HIGH POWERED TASK FORCE on examination reforms under the leadership of Shri Nandan Nilekani constituted.

@NandanNilekani

[Salman Khan @BeingSalmanKhan]

The students are at top priority, educationally n security-wise, so they need not worry and have their parents worried for them. The Honorable Prime Minister has tweeted, and I am sure that he will take strict action against all those people who are responsible for this leak. So students, plz go back to your parents n homes.

Sonam, it's done, bro. Don't extend this. Keep the spirit for another day if there be a need, which I doubt, n eat something. If u want, will send u food from home.

[SS Iyengar 🇮🇳 @Isriramseshadri]

Awesome song / tune in Boloch language. Touches one’s heart. Art / music & god transends language.

[Balwant @balwant]

Please value experience and get the tested failures #Agarkar #Gambhir #shreyas out immediately #Disgrace #IndVsEngland

[raga-learns-to-rock @pnamblat]

Rohan Prasanna who played sarod for ARR in “Tere pass mein”
His improvisations are 🔥, the end note of mukda which is in minor
#mainwapasaaunga

[Paushali Sahu @PaushaliSahu]

Watching Main Vaapas Aaunga felt deeply personal. My grandparents were children during Partition. They carried those wounds all their lives, rebuilding everything from scratch, starting over with courage, and living with memories that never really left them. Their stories were whispered through my childhood, and this film brought back emotions that had quietly stayed hidden for years in our family..

Thank you Imtiyaz Ali for telling stories with so much tenderness. Perhaps no one else could have touched this subject with such grace. ❤️
Thank you AR Rahman for such a beautiful gift of an album to our generation..🫶

And thank you Irshad Kamil, for writing words that feel like they have always belonged to us.🫶
Sharing my humble cover of a song that moved me beyond words. 🎶💛Original sung by Deepali Sahay in her lilting voice 🎶

[DavidLinthicum @DavidLinthicum]

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Why the AI Infrastructure Buildout Math Doesn't Work

I have to give IBM CEO Arvind Krishna credit. He's saying what many of us in this industry have been thinking but haven't been willing to say out loud. The math just doesn't add up.

Here's what I'm seeing that's deeply troubling. We're in the middle of another mass hallucination. Just like the dot-com bubble, just like blockchain, just like the metaverse — everyone is convinced that building massive data centers will automatically create massive wealth.

But here's the thing about building infrastructure. You actually have to sell what's inside it.

Let's talk numbers. The planned data center buildout over the next 5-10 years is staggering. We're talking about commitments in the hundreds of gigawatts globally. The capital expenditure commitments are in the trillions. Yet when you look at the actual demand signals, not the projections, not the potential, but the actual consumption patterns, there's a massive gap. These AI companies are betting everything on demand that simply doesn't exist at the scale they're planning for.

Let me be direct. AI services are expensive. Enterprise adoption is slow. Consumer AI is still finding its footing. And the compute requirements being promised by the hyperscalers require a level of demand that would represent a fundamental shift in how businesses consume technology. That's a big ask.

I've seen this pattern before. The overbuilding. The belief that if you build it, they will come. The groupthink that turns critical analysis into heresy. The result is always the same. Companies are going to touch the stove. We're going to see massive write-downs. We're going to see pivots, shutdowns, and strategic reviews. We're going to see companies that spent years and billions trying to be the AI infrastructure leader become case studies in how not to read a market.

The IBM CEO is right. The math doesn't work. And unlike 1999, we don't have the excuse of we didn't know. We know exactly what's happening. We just don't want to believe it because the alternative, being a skeptic while everyone else is piling in, feels like career suicide. It's not. The ones who survive the next decade will be the ones who built for reality, not fantasy.

Wake up. The emperor has no clothes.

As reported by Futurism, Krishna laid out striking calculations: a 1 gigawatt data center costs roughly $80 billion today. If one company commits 20-30 gigawatts, that's $1.5 trillion in capital expenditure. The total commitments across the industry for chasing AGI are approximately 100 gigawatts, equaling $8 trillion. To break even, you'd need $800 billion in profit just to cover the interest. That's not investment. That's hoping.

https://t.co/4DAnF5OPfa

[Balwant @balwant]

A good embedded thread on the progress made in India in the past decade #incredibleindia do visit, a lot more to do though to maintain this

[wonder woman 🗡️🪷🚩 @RohiSRH]

Foreigners visited Hyderabad... and were completely shocked! 🤯🇮🇳👇

This is India but Elon's algo keeps pushing Old Anti-India, pro-slum content

[Karthik 🇮🇳 @beastoftraal]

This film was made mainly for the audience of Bajaj Group's 100-year celebration event, but consider Rajkumar Hirani's involvement as director, it is no surprise that it has been released to the public too.

Most corporate films of this nature tend to look like documentaries, charting the evolution of the company with the seriousness of a PowerPoint presentation. But this one, conceptualized by Wondrlab India, and directed by Rajkumar Hirani, is actually a fun, entertaining watch, despite the (almost) 10-minutes duration!

There's also skillful use of AI in bringing some long-dead personalities to life, and it was great to see Mahatma Gandhi ride a Bajaj scooter as if it was his personal vehicle all the time!

My only grouse was Gandhi not asking Sanjiv Bajaj, "Beta Sanjiv... aap log bar bar spam call or message karke logon ko kyun pareshan karte ho?".

#marketing #creativity

[Deepak Shenoy @deepakshenoy]

One of the key influences to reduce dollar spends is on gold imports. India's demand has been high, and was $51 billion in FY25. It is likely to be about $92bn in FY26. Remember, net imports of crude - a larger import - was about $102bn in FY26.

Given that we export other things, our current account deficit should be around $80bn in FY26 (up from $50bn in FY25) Basically, cutting crude oil imports and gold by 25% each will bring the deficit down substantially.

So cutting gold is useful, to some extent. There's demand from retail buying of coins. From ETFs. From the jewellery sector. And now from other digital gold products.

We imported around 780 tonnes of gold last year.

RBI has a lot of gold. It bought gold, and has brought back gold it stored abroad. It doesn't need this much gold - it has over 800 tonnes. And it has a bloated balance sheet - way too high for a central bank that isn't doing any QE. More than 85 lakh crores sits in the central bank bal sheet - and more than 12 lakh crores is in gold alone.

The RBI can slowly bring back more gold reserves back to india - it's doing about 100-200 tonnes per year anyhow. It can then sell 200 tonnes of gold locally, to serve the jewellery market this year (this will satisfy about half the demand)

That would mean there is no dollars going out for importing gold. Not too much - only $30 bn or so, but that's enough to offset the current account deficit substantially.

There is no major pressing need then for domestic consumers to stop consuming gold. The consumption will slow if prices fall; and if the rupee improves, and India's gold imports slow, prices should be under control.

Anyhow, telling people to not buy gold has the opposite effect. We don't trust our government, inherently. So if they tell us to not buy, we will buy more. It's a bit of a problem to express this desire. Buy Indian is fine. Don't buy gold isn't going to help, I think.

Now there's an impact - if the RBI sells 200 tonnes of gold, it will hurt rupee liquidity (any rupee paid to the RBI for its gold = rupee out of circulation). that's about 300,000 cr. rupees. But there is a huge surplus right now, and we can ease out 300,000 cr. through some temporary moves (VRR) or durable ones (RBI buying government bonds). This will reduce some forex reserves but just $30 bn which is a very small number compared to over $500 bn we own and which isn't that necessary.

It will also help stabilize the rupee, allowing future inflows to be planned by foreign investors. It will also help in reducing any supply imbalances.

This will help for one year, by which time, the government can create more room for foreign investment through regulatory red tape reduction, level playing field on taxes for FPIs, single window clearances etc.

In short: RBI should sell about 15 tonnes of gold per month to the domestic market and that's enough to reduce a lot of the imports, reduce the current account deficit and allow the rupee to stabilize.