Jay

Getting to know myself

[Life Pill 💊 @life__pill]

NOBODY WILL REMEMBER

1) Your salary
2) How busy you were
3) How many hours you worked
4) How many Gucci bags you owned
5) Your job title
6) The car you drove
7) The size of your house
8) Your social media followers
9) The brands you wore

PEOPLE WILL REMEMBER

1) How you made them feel
2) The time you spent with them
3) If you kept your word
4) If they could count on you
5) How you listened
6) How you supported them
7) The kindness you showed
8) The memories you created
9) The respect you gave

BUT STILL PRIORITIZE THE THINGS "NO BODY WILL REMEMBER"

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Once you realize that anything can happen; sickness, death, lose your job... Literally, anything in the blink of an eye, you become very humble. Tables turn and that's how crazy life can get.

Always stay humble, and be grateful.

[Jay @jayb523]

@Bhanu_R780 Nathan Lyon

[Hims 🪷 🚴 🌱 🧘 @maveinlux]

Frank Rossavik and @Aftenposten have produced a lazy, racist caricature of Prime Minister Modi as a cross-legged snake-charmer piping a fuel nozzle out of a basket, the sort of tired colonial drivel one expects from a fading European rag desperate for relevance.

Very well. Let us return the compliment with equal subtlety.
Picture Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway’s Prime Minister, seated smugly on a block of Arctic ice, dressed in a ridiculous woollen jumper and reindeer horns, cheeks flushed from aquavit at 11 a.m. With a self-satisfied smirk he plays a little flute, coaxing a thick black crude-oil gusher from the mouth of a dying whale, while a bloated Norwegian oil barrel sits in a wicker basket labelled “World’s Greenest Oil Exporter.” The caption: “A rich, preachy and rather hypocritical little man.”

For here is the nation that lectures India on climate virtue while pumping record volumes of fossil fuels, funding its lavish welfare state with the very carbon it scolds others for using. A people famed for eye-watering prices, glacial social warmth, and a lingering superiority complex, all while clinging to controversial whaling and sealing traditions that much of the world finds barbaric.

The hypocrisy is as thick as Norwegian cod-liver oil.
Perhaps Rossavik should reflect on that before his next sermon on Indian democracy. The caricature, sir, works both ways, and yours was never clever.

Utterly disgraceful @Aftenposten . And if this is what gets you a number 1 position in the press freedom Ms @HelleLyngSvends , then i think India is well placed at 157, or whatever you please to offer it.

[Smita Barooah @smitabarooah]

The quiet grief of adult friendship: One of the most beautiful articles I've read in a while. Hits hard
https://t.co/qXi6UBaTs3

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.

The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.

His name is David Eagleman.

He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.

Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.

Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.

You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.

Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.

This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.

In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.

Now sit with the implication of that for a second.

Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.

If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.

But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.

Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.

Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.

They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.

The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.

The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.

Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.

So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.

Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.

A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.

And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.

Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.

Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.

For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.

They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.

The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.

You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.

Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

"It is incredible how much mass slaughter one can get away with when you have the protective cover of the intellectual class."

This is the most important line about Bengal from another post by @IndiaSpeaksPR. As @jsaideepak documents below, after the 2021 election, BJP voters and even some CPM voters were murdered or raped, and the "intellectual media" looked the other way because they wanted to "save" Bengal from a party they disliked. That was it.

Bengal was a heroic win for the BJP, paid for with blood. I cannot imagine the sacrifices made.

My salute to the brave warriors who fought hard to get here🙏

[Sai Deepak J @jsaideepak]

1. Just got off a call with @UnSubtleDesi. I couldn't be happier for her and both of us couldn't help but discuss the harrowing days of post poll violence in West Bengal in 2021. So I am going to share what happened five years ago just so ppl know what happened. #WestBengal2026.

[Jay @jayb523]

+1. Absolutely senseless.

[Vishal Bhargava @VishalBhargava5]

You become what you hate. BJP is now almost Congress,

[Jay @jayb523]

This is atrocious to say the least. How was this even allowed?

[Peyush Bansal @peyushbansal]

I have listened to your concerns and I understand your sentiment around this. I want to add more context to my earlier post.

The document currently circulating is an outdated internal training document. It is not an HR policy.

That said, it contained an incorrect line about bindi/tilak that should never have been written and does not reflect our values or actual practice. When we discovered this on February 17, well before this became a public conversation, we immediately removed it.

But I should have caught this earlier. As Founder and CEO, the responsibility for such lapses is mine. I have asked my team to bring all such materials under stricter review, and I will personally ensure this is addressed going forward. We are also looking into how this found its way into our training content.

Let me be absolutely clear. Lenskart does not and will never restrict any form of respectful religious expression. This includes bindi, tilak, or any such symbols of faith. Our team members have always been, and will always be, free to express their beliefs with pride.

I also want to thank everyone who raised this. Your voice helps us improve and stay true to what we stand for.

[Swati Chaturvedi @bainjal]

If you thought Nida Khan & her shenanigans in TCS were a one off

[Lissa♥️♥️ @lizzkelly7]

The fake urgency created in corporate life for absolutely no reason is one of the worst things humans have invented.

[Jay @jayb523]

Victim blaming at its best

[Varun Kumar Rana @VarunKrRana]

It is disgusting to see The Indian Express choose to amplify the accused’s wife’s narrative instead of standing by the victims. This isn’t reporting; it seems like a pathetic attempt to shield the suspects. Shameful.

[Chandra R. Srikanth @chandrarsrikant]

TCS Nashik sexual harassment case a failure of internal systems, processes: Industry experts

https://t.co/8C9sUXTFaC

[Jay @jayb523]

Astonishing how this was allowed to go on for so long. Shocking to say the least.

[Priyanka Chaturvedi🇮🇳 @priyankac19]

“The Tata Group maintains a zero-tolerance policy towards any form of coercion or misconduct by its employees. A thorough investigation is underway to establish the facts and identify all individuals responsible for this situation.”
Statement from the Chairman of Tata Sons N Chandrasekaran is obviously an attempt to salvage the credibility of TCS.
Considering this exploitation went on for over 4 years with zero consequence & the missing“zero tolerance policy” speaks volumes of what was wrong at @TCS BPO.

[Shubhendu @BBTheorist]

Why are academicians, activists and intellectuals not talking about the TCS Nashik case?

•The Tata Group manages its reputation by leveraging its philanthropic ownership structure to position itself as a ‘nation builder’ rather than a profit-driven corporate. They cultivate deep-rooted soft power by funding elite academic and social institutions, which helps insulate them from criticism by intellectuals and activists. Their PR strategy favors a gentlemanly high ground, framing controversies as value-based conflicts rather than management failures. Ultimately, by embedding themselves into India’s social and cultural infrastructure, they ensure a permanent reservoir of public goodwill that softens the impact of any negative publicity.

[Jay @jayb523]

Very concerning.

[Swati Chaturvedi @bainjal]

Spoke to sources in Nashik police & senior officials in Mumbai also a source in TCS.
1
Without mincing words the situation was quite alarming and the company a blue chip biggie fought hard at all levels - political, official and media to ensure that the story never came out.
2
TCS displayed a lackadaisical approach when the first complaints trickled in & effectively led a HR mounted cover up. The top leaders of TCS ought to be worried if this is the level of HR and corporate governance across the board in the company. Totally sub par.
3
Police sources say the company was more interested in ensuring that no bad press entailed instead of standing with the victims following due process and ensuring the accused are punished. Even now “calls” from Mumbai are coming in to supposedly monitor the process.
4
All Tata crisis communications companies have now put on the job to make the Nashik TCS sexual harassment and conversion racket disappear from all MSM
5
finally Nashik is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg apparently the HR hiring contagion has spread.

if you don’t want this to vanish from the headlines where it has barely made an impact keep asking police & TCS to act

[Priyanka Chaturvedi🇮🇳 @priyankac19]

Why aren’t we talking about this enough? How could a corporate BPO office&that too a big one like TCS continue to function without any accountability despite several women complaining about the harassment and abuse besides religious conversion attempts. https://t.co/kX4Ie2YEql

[Vice Admiral Jaggi Bedi (Retd) @JaggiBedi]

Many of us may have experienced this. Author spot on.