VENKATESWARAN

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

I believe we now have evidence of FIFA's World Cup ticketing shell game: FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management.

Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market!) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections 101/102, 112/113, 119/120, 134–137, 139, ...

The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.

That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

Why doesn't FIFA just lower prices on its own site Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.

Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.

[VENKATESWARAN @blur2clear]

CLAUDE

[Farzam Hejazi @FarzamHejazi]

Tired of doing the same boring LinkedIn job search, connection requests, and referral requests every day?

I was too, so I built a Claude code plugin that handles it for me. In 3 months it helped me send 200 applications, get 70+ referrals, land 20 interviews and 6 offers, and a great new role at @Snowflake .

It pairs a simple job tracker with @claudeai code Desktop and the Claude Chrome extension to help:

• Finds and ranks new jobs daily
• Flags referral-needed companies
• Tracks applications, referrals, deadlines, and priorities
• Drafts and sends referral DMs from your resume
• Guides LinkedIn outreach without spreadsheet chaos

The goal is simple:

Spend less time doing repetitive LinkedIn tasks.
Spend more time preparing, interviewing, and talking to the right people.

Repo: https://t.co/3OkUhRbqWa

Want the plugin that automates the entire application flow, including submission?
Comment "CLAUDE" and I'll DM it to you.

[Farzam Hejazi @FarzamHejazi]

Tired of doing the same boring LinkedIn job search, connection requests, and referral requests every day?

I was too, so I built a Claude code plugin that handles it for me. In 3 months it helped me send 200 applications, get 70+ referrals, land 20 interviews and 6 offers, and a great new role at @Snowflake .

It pairs a simple job tracker with @claudeai code Desktop and the Claude Chrome extension to help:

• Finds and ranks new jobs daily
• Flags referral-needed companies
• Tracks applications, referrals, deadlines, and priorities
• Drafts and sends referral DMs from your resume
• Guides LinkedIn outreach without spreadsheet chaos

The goal is simple:

Spend less time doing repetitive LinkedIn tasks.
Spend more time preparing, interviewing, and talking to the right people.

Repo: https://t.co/3OkUhRbqWa

Want the plugin that automates the entire application flow, including submission?
Comment "CLAUDE" and I'll DM it to you.

[Joy Bhattacharjya @joybhattacharj]

It's Ravi Shastri's birthday today. And most of you probably remember him for coin tosses and 'tracer bullets.'
But Ravi Shastri was a Champion of Champions in 1985 in a tournament that featured the likes of Imran, Hadlee, Kapil and Viv Richards, getting there with a phenomenal work ethic and attitude.
Ravi Shastri was the first Indian cricketer to openly give back as good as he got from those sledging him, Aussies, Poms, even the fearsome West Indian pacers.
He averaged 40 plus away against Australia and the West Indies with a memorable century against Roberts, Holding and Marshall at St John's and an epic double hundred at Sydeney.
Ravi was the hardest bargainer before he got on to a project, but once he committed, he worked like a complete professional, and again, there aren't too many you can say that about. And he'd actually buy you a drink after as well.
Have a great year @RaviShastriOfc, there are few who've done as much with what they've been given

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

When actor Sayaji Shinde lost his mother, he made her a promise — to plant trees in her memory.

What began with 5,000 saplings grew into Sahyadri Devrai, a movement that has now nurtured over 6.5 lakh native trees across Maharashtra.

By restoring indigenous forests with banyan, peepal, tamarind and more, this initiative is reviving ecosystems, supporting wildlife, and proving that love can continue to grow long after loss.

@SayajiShinde

#SayajiShinde #SahyadriDevrai #Maharashtra #Actor

[Sayaji Shinde, Maharashtra, native forest conservation]

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

19th May marked the 92nd birthday of Ruskin Bond, the writer who quietly became a part of so many of our childhoods without ever meeting us.

And honestly, seeing Suhavini, founder of Indian Cultural Hub, celebrate it with him at the Ruskin Bond Literature Festival in Lekhak Gaon feels like watching a reader’s dream come alive.

For so many of us, Ruskin Bond wasn’t just an author.
He was rainy afternoons, library periods, sleepy hill stations, old bookshops, ghost stories under blankets, and the comfort of feeling understood in silence.

The festival in Dehradun was created to celebrate that very legacy, bringing together readers, writers, artists, storytellers and everyone who grew up finding home in his words.

Somewhere between “The Blue Umbrella,” “Rusty,” old school textbooks and mountain stories… Ruskin Bond became a memory we all share.

What was the first Ruskin Bond story you ever read?

Credits : Founder suhavini | indiaculturalhub on IG
#RuskinBond #ChildhoodMemories #BookLovers #IndianLiterature #Nostalgia

[Ruskin Bond, Literature Festival, Childhood Memories, Indian Literature]

[Dr Gaurav Luthra 👀 surgeon @drgauravluthra]

Flew Air India Express today IX 1058 and witnessed this heated argument between a passenger on row 1 and cabin crew.
After paying an additional fee of over ₹1300 for a front row seat one would expect space for cabin bags in overhead bins but on both sides of the aisle, the bins over rows 1 and 2 are reserved for crew, captain and emergency equipment inconveniencing front rows passengers.
Bins over rows 3 and 4 are used up by their occupants.
Where does the airline expect passengers on rows 1 and 2 to keep their bags.
Crew is helpless and at sea. .
Moreover when deplaning everyone jumps up and blocks the aisle the moment setbelt signs are off. So even if someone kept bags in bins behind rows 1 and 2 would have to fight his or her way to retrieve them.
Am sure these fights happen everyday but somebody in the airline management is just not bothered.
@airindia @AirIndiaX @airsewa_MoCA @MoCA_GoI @IndiGo6E @DelhiAirport @AAI_Official

[Amunet @freakoutsideofx]

Alan Alda, now 90-years-old, with Mike Farrell (now 86) toasting the 50th anniversary of their hit show, M*A*S*H, in 2022.

[Meghna Pant @MeghnaPant]

Four hours at the Passport Office Mumbai @rpomumbai with my minor daughter for her passport renewal because the father’s signature isn’t there. FOUR HOURS of zero clarity, zero empathy, zero system. My child is hungry, exhausted, sitting on a plastic chair in a sea of chaos while officials keep sending us from one counter to another with no answers.

Why is a single mother still treated like a suspicious exception instead of a parent? Why is a child being punished because the system cannot handle families that don’t fit a perfect template? Absolute humiliation, overcrowding, indifference, and no accountability. Passport Office Mumbai seriously needs to do better for single parents and children. This is really not a country for single mothers.

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it.

Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak.

Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people."

1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support.

2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade.

3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility.

4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing.

India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

[Star Seeker @starseeker1334]

Congrats, you all discovered how google AI image generation got so good so quickly,

everyone using a drive, every TB of family photos kept in a cloud for safekeeping, so long promised to be private, is scanned, used and abused by google.

Never believe in anything they say.

[Ajay Wadhwa @ajaywadhwa123]

It is a direct affront to India. We are now, perhaps, one of the four countries in the world who are required to take a visa on arrival. All others are exempt. This is because they have probably had enough of Indian travellers most of who create a ruckus there and go with only one objective....
Vietnam will also close doors if Indians do not improve qualitatively.

[Artful Dodger @RahulChels]

As @mybmc commissioner @AshwiniBhide works to encroach on our open spaces, below are the parks in the city where her own son lives.

Even their worst ones might be as good as our best.

[Muthukrishnan Dhandapani @dmuthuk]

In general, even among high income earners, let me tell you when someone reach a wealth of say Rs.3 crores.

Age in late forties to early fifties. Designated as Vertical Head or Senior Director or similar titles. CTC anywhere between Rs.60 lakhs to Rs.1 crore per annum.

Own a 3 BHK flat. Would have repaid home loan. Say 2 children in high school or college. A decent car mostly under company (employer) lease.

Mutual funds, shares, money in bank and Provident Fund - roughly around Rs.3 crores. In exceptional cases, close to Rs.5 crores.

This is general standard among high income earners in our country.

So don't fall for finfluencers trap of creating wealth of Rs.50 or Rs.100 crores is easy.

Except for extremely lucky or corrupt, making every single crore is difficult.

[Craters of Mumbai (Potholes ka Parivar) @CratersOfMumbai]

Why wasn't a feasibility analysis conducted BEFORE commencing the concretisation of roads?

Why has the Minister of Urban Development not been placed on the chopping block? @Dev_Fadnavis

[Devesh Mankar | @[email protected] @Devz15]

🚨 WARNING for all Pixel owners in India. 🚨

My Pixel device was sent to official Google repair. After inspection, Google declared it “not repairable” and gave me only 2 choices:

1️⃣ Pay ₹22,620 for a replacement device
2️⃣ Get the phone returned unrepaired

Now comes the shocking part.

Before taking ₹22k+, Google India REFUSES to disclose:

❌ Which exact device they will send
❌ Whether it’s NEW or REFURBISHED
❌ Battery health details
❌ Water Resistance Rating
❌ Replacement quality standards
❌ Google cannot guarantee battery health percentage
❌ Google cannot guarantee IP/water resistance rating

And in writing, Google Support confirmed:
⚠️ Once payment is made, there is NO refund and NO return — even if you are unhappy with the replacement device quality sent later.

Most shocking part?

Google could not even confirm whether they have any minimum measurable quality standards/policies for refurbished replacement devices:

Battery health %
Water resistance integrity like IP rating

So basically:

Pay first.
Find out later what device you got.
No refund. No choice.
Without transparency, measurable quality benchmarks or refund rights.

This is not premium after-sales support.
This is “trust us after payment.”

Attaching screenshots of Google Support’s own email response.

Indian Pixel buyers deserve transparency before payment, not blind acceptance.

@GoogleIndia @madebygoogle
#GooglePixel #PixelIndia #Pixel6 #GoogleIndia #ConsumerRights #RightToRepair #MadeByGoogle #TechTwitter #Android #Smartphones

[VENKATESWARAN @blur2clear]

Why a Patna creator with 50,000 followers matters more to brands now than a Mumbai influencer - https://t.co/728lycMuVn

[The Indian Express @IndianExpress]

‘Language doesn’t matter.. Passengers only convey location & negotiate fares’: How Mumbai views Marathi mandate https://t.co/lHdhRdA11z

[Saib Bilaval @SaibBilaval]

India 2026, where you can't withdraw your own EPF but a bank RM can break your FD:

[WV Raman @wvraman]

This is what I like about the Mumbai cricketing fraternity..