Govind Sethunath

Area Man 🇮🇳 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🇮🇷

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Two thousand years ago, a Roman poet wrote two lines about a woman he loved and could not stand at the same moment. I hate and I love, he wrote. I do not know why. I only feel it happening, and it tortures me. The last word he chose, excrucior, is the root of our word excruciating. It means to be crucified. Catullus was writing about heartbreak in the first century BC, reaching for the same word you reach for at 2am.

He was not even the first to feel it. More than five hundred years before him, on a Greek island, Sappho wrote down what wanting someone does to a body. Her tongue breaks. A thin fire runs under her skin. Her ears ring, her eyes go dark, she sweats and shakes and feels close to dying, all because the person she wants is laughing with someone else across the room. Catullus loved that poem so much he rewrote it into one of his own. The exact feeling got handed down across five centuries and a whole sea.

The boredom is there too. Marcus Aurelius ran the largest empire on earth and spent his nights writing private notes to himself just to stay sane. He called them, roughly, To Himself, and never meant for anyone to read them. He opens by bracing himself for the day, reminding himself that the people he would meet would be ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, and exhausting. The most powerful man alive, quietly dreading his meetings, around 175 AD.

The hunger for meaning runs deepest. The oldest surviving epic, from around four thousand years ago, follows a king named Gilgamesh who watches his only real friend die and falls apart. He tears his clothes, wanders into the wilderness in animal skins, and travels to the end of the world looking for a way to never die. He fails. He comes home, and the failure is the point.

People love to share one line about all of this: "We read to know we are not alone." It gets credited to C.S. Lewis everywhere. There is no record of him ever writing it. A screenwriter named William Nicholson wrote those words for Shadowlands, a play and film about Lewis's life, for a character based on Lewis. The most quoted sentence about reading to feel less alone was invented, then carried so far by people who needed it that it got pinned to someone they trusted. The line did the thing it describes.

Your peculiar little feelings have always existed. Someone already felt them, wrote them down, and waited a few thousand years for you to find it.

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This is Jim. He’s 78 years old, has been battling heart failure since 2023, and has lost both of his sons. He still deadlifts, trains, and posts motivational gym content in their honor

[PsikoBilim @Psikobilim_]

Making decisions when angry is risky; because the feeling of anger, by giving us a sense of "power and control," encourages us to take risks.

[beyza dogan ironisi @beyzipsg]

Maskülen erkekler;
-Cinsel partnerine daha sadık
-Evli olma ihtimalleri daha yüksek
-Duygusal ilişkiyi daha fazla önceliyorlar
-Evliliklerinde sevildiklerini hissetme ihtimalleri daha fazla.

Feminen erkeklerde ise durum tam tersi.

[Chen Zhuo | Katrina @SouthernM46171]

This is a rare piece of strategic clarity from India. It admits that India cannot balance China alone, that US support created an illusion of capacity, and that Washington’s China policy was never designed for India’s benefit.

India’s problem is not only that it borrowed American power. It also borrowed America’s threat perception. Much of Delhi’s strategic community accepted Washington’s view of China, elevated China into India’s primary adversary, and then tried to pursue that rivalry without America’s economic, military or technological weight.

That is a dangerous mismatch. Beijing rarely treats India as a peer strategic competitor. India, by contrast, has increasingly organised its foreign policy around China. The result is an unequal contest in which India carries far more relative cost.

India still depends heavily on Chinese technology, industrial inputs, investment and critical materials. A harder line can slow India’s own development while imposing only limited pain on Beijing. Meanwhile, Washington can escalate today, bargain tomorrow and leave India exposed.

So “de-Americanising” Indian strategy must mean more than building ships, factories and semiconductors. It must also mean thinking with Indian eyes.

The real question is not whether India should fight China for America. It is whether defining China as India’s principal enemy was ever strategically sound.

#India #China #USIndia #StrategicAutonomy #Geopolitics

[Sergio Ferrero @calotonterias]

8 características psicólogicas de las personas que viven más de 100 años:

1. Vitalidad.
- Actividad: Ganas de hacer cosas, trabajar, mantenerse ocupados (ej. coser hasta los 98, crucigramas).
- Participación: No quedarse al margen, aprovechar oportunidades.

2. Gusto por la interacción.
- Sociabilidad: Facilidad para hacer amigos, conversadores.
- Vínculos cálidos: Se sienten queridos por familia y cuidadores.
- Altruismo: Ayudar desinteresadamente a otros.

3. Compromiso.
- Competencia: Alto rendimiento en el trabajo.
- Responsabilidad: Sentido del deber (cuidar familia, negocios).
- Perseverancia: Determinación ante obstáculos.
- Honestidad: Confiables y veraces.

4. Control.
- Autonomía: Tomar decisiones propias.
- Dominio del entorno: Organizar y aprovechar oportunidades.
- Práctica: Adaptarse a la realidad de forma útil.

5. Motivación intelectual.
- Curiosidad: Viajar, estar informados.
- Amor por el aprendizaje: Lectura voraz, valorar educación.
- Autodidactas: Aprender solos oficios o habilidades.

6. Positividad.
- Gratitud: Agradecer lo bueno pese a dificultades.
- Disfrute: Aprovechar experiencias positivas cotidianas.

7. Resiliencia.
- Capacidad para superar adversidades (guerra civil, pérdidas, abusos) sin daño psicológico duradero y seguir adelante.

8. Inteligencia (transversal).
- Resolver problemas, aprender rápido, buena memoria, éxito laboral sin formación formal.

[Hereafter @idyllicmusing]

When a woman’s partner isn’t very sexually attractive, around her most fertile days she feels a stronger pull toward other men for their genes, while men unconsciously detect or respond to heightened infidelity risk and show more affection. Those with highly attractive mates didn’t show the same shift (potentially satisfied with in-pair “good genes”). Knowing this helps us choose partners and build family life intentionally. This also supports the idea that ancestral women may have pursued a mixed strategy—securing resources/commitment from a primary partner while seeking genetic benefits from extra-pair copulations during fertile periods, especially if the main mate fell short on “sexy” traits. It fits broader ovulatory shift research (e.g., preferences for masculine features, symmetry) but highlights conditional, partner-dependent effects.

[Mikale Olson @realmikolson]

This may just be the single greatest tweet of all time

#worldcup

[Audrey Truschke @AudreyTruschke]

One thing that all serious scholars of South Asia know, but much of the public continues to get wrong, is stated here (again) by Romila Thapar -

The idea of Hindus vs. Muslims, as separate and antagonistic groups, is colonial propaganda. You can't decolonize with that foundation

[Gerald markel @MarkelGerald]

BREAKING
Das Märchen vom "unprovoziertem Angriffskrieg" Russlands gegen die Ukraine ist widerlegt

Die New York Times bestätigt in einem aufsehenerregendem Beitrag dass die westlichen Geheimdienste CIA und MI6 ab dem vom Westen organisierten und finanziertem Putsch am Maidan 2014 ein Bündnis mit den Ukrainern eingingen und dann jahrelang Kriegsvorbereitungen unternahmen !

Unter anderem wurden laut NYT insgesamt 12 geheime Stützpunkte für Infiltration und Kommandoaktionen an der Grenze der Ukraine zu Russland eingerichtet und von CIA und MI6 gemeinsam mit dem ukrainischen Geheimdienst SBU geführt
Mit anderen Worten
Wir -der Westen- haben diesen Krieg generalstabsmässig geplant und Russland tat dem DeepState den Gefallen im Februar 2022 loszuschlagen

2 Millionen gefallene und invalide Ukrainer klagen an ....
#Stopthiswar
GM

[Mark Hyman, M.D. @drmarkhyman]

A recent study found that doing 10 bodyweight squats every 45 minutes during an 8.5-hour period of sitting, is more effective for blood sugar regulation than a single 30-minute walk.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

We know that LDL is behind heart disease on the basis of all the available causal evidence.

There's biological plausibility, a strong association, a biological gradient, temporality, specificity, consistent results, coherent findings, and we can see that cutting LDL saves lives.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En Los Ángeles (EEUU), una mujer celebraba la victoria de los Knicks en la NBA, cuando un vecino avisó a la policía por los ruidos... se presentaron 20 policías y fusilaron a su perro, un "peligroso" Golden Doodle, al abrir la puerta de casa.

EEUU, un régimen policial donde te fusilan al perro si chillas en tu casa demasiado alto... la policía no te protege, tú eres quién tiene que protegerse de la policía.

[Mustafa Yücel @GillesDeleuze17]

Erkekler yapmadıkları, kadınlar ise yaptıkları cinsel ilişkiler için pişman olur.

Çünkü erkek beyni kaçan cinsel fırsatları bir "evrimsel kayıp" olarak algılarken, kadın beyni riskli ve kötü seçimleri bir hayatta kalma tehdidi olarak görür.

[Адекватник @mart_mio]

Псаки (2022): «Россия врёт про биолаборатории США на Украине. У неё самой есть такая программа». Габбард (2026): «США финансируют 120+ биолабораторий в 30 странах, включая Украину. В них — опасные патогены.

Лживая российская пропаганда, опять оказалась права.

[Sharing Travel @TripInChina]

What he said is true.😂😂
Today, Lei Jun, He is a Shang, the chairman of Xiaomi and a member of the lowest caste in China's caste system, is squatting on the street to have breakfast in Wuhan.

[Carver @carverfomo]

An American TV crew filmed a 24 year old Chinese engineer in his San Francisco apartment for a feature on remote workers who never leave home. He had not been to an office in eight months. AI handled his calls, his messages and every reply his bosses got, while he collected a salary from five companies at once.

On camera he said the line everyone screenshotted: going to five morning calls would be exhausting, so I push them all into AI and stay in VR.

His story was simple. Meta hired him from a research lab. The job was remote. He preferred meetings in VR. So he wore the headset all day. So nobody saw him.

The crew thought that was the story. It was not.

Pause at 0:25. The camera holds on the wall behind his desk for four seconds. Look at the shelf above it. Everyone saw one laptop. Almost nobody saw the other four. The four were not backups. The four were jobs.

Each laptop runs an AI trained on the way he writes. Each one joins the morning calls in his voice. They talk to each other so the same work never gets done twice. He sits in the VR headset and watches the five jobs unfold around him.

For months all five teams have been thanking him for being so responsive. None of them has ever been in the same call as another.

He still wears the same headset every morning. He still sits in the same chair. He still passes every review. He still has not told his mom about the other four jobs.

The crew came to film a remote worker who lived on a mattress on the floor. They left with a man who had not done a single day of work himself in eight months, while five American companies kept thanking him.

His AI replied to all five morning calls again today. He watched. They thought: he is really trying.

[Video Game History @VideoGameHstry]

7K9D-3XPL-Q8TM-2VNR-5CWF

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

You're a man. 97% of your stress should be about money or job, not about who is not talking to you.

[CA Ganesh k Choudhary @cagkchoudhary]

No office. No entry pass. Just a bag, a dream, and roadside samosas outside the BSE.

This is how Rakesh Jhunjhunwala started in 1985.

Every financial empire starts with the beginner's grind. Never look down on your humble beginnings. 📈