Neha Thakur

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

The most fun part of Ganpati at home, is the prep, and the fun peaks on the day before when entire family is engaged in decorating #iykyk

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@warikoo Congratulations on this successful program. But would you let kids drink colas and eat ultra processed just becoz they are sponsoring. Since you promote healthy lifestyle wouldn’t it be better the same ethos be followed for sponsorship?

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@godbole_shilpa Yes, my mom still does it. I use to do it till I was in India. Typically on Fridays we had gul chane Prasad.

[Amit Paranjape @aparanjape]

The amazing Richard Feynman... worth listening to any of his clips again and again!

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@FinRight Couldn’t find the link in first comment.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

On GuruPurnima day, an accomplished professor was mocked by our leader in opposition! Speaks a lot about why India is where it is today and what needs to change.

[Shining Science @ShiningScience]

Sweden is officially trading screens and tablets for physical books and handwriting to reverse a decline in reading skills.

Once at the forefront of hyper-digitalized learning, Sweden is engineering a dramatic pivot back to the basics in its classrooms. Concerned that an overreliance on digital tablets and screens has eroded reading comprehension and foundational writing skills, Swedish education officials are investing heavily in traditional printed textbooks.

The national strategy aims to phase out digital devices for children under the age of six entirely, following a drop in international reading assessment scores.

Experts point out that while technology was championed to level the playing field, its unrestricted use has instead led to shorter attention spans and reduced retention among younger learners.

Scientific evidence strongly supports this retro transition. Research indicates that the physical act of handwriting activates complex neural networks governing motor skills, vision, memory, and language—cognitive benefits that are largely lost on a keyboard.

Furthermore, reading from a printed page provides critical spatial cues that aid comprehension, unlike digital screens that often subject students to cognitive fatigue and constant distractions. While computers and tablets remain valuable tools for research and collaboration, educators worldwide are watching Sweden's massive reinvestment in physical books as a potential blueprint for a more balanced, science-backed approach to modern schooling.

source: The Guardian. Switching off: Sweden says back-to-basics schooling works on paper.

[Pawan Chandana @PawanKChandana]

As everything slowly begins to sink-in, and after finally getting some sleep last night, I wanted to share a small personal note…✍️

The first call I made after Vikram-1 successfully reached orbit was to my Dad.

He is the man who made my journey possible—with dreams for me far bigger than the ones I had for myself, and by simply never giving up on me.

Until my 8th standard, I was a bad student. I scored 51 marks in Maths and even failed another subject. Back then, I could never have imagined that I would one day make it to an IIT—or have the privilege of contributing to India’s first privately developed rocket reaching orbit, making India only the third country in the world to achieve this.

When I called him after the launch, he just cried.

And cried.

He couldn’t speak a single word.

But I understood every word he couldn’t say.

I managed to hold back my tears when Vikram-1 reached orbit. But somehow, writing this, I can’t.

Thank you, Dad. ❤️

And a big shout-out to every dad who dreams big for their children—and never gives up on them. 🙏

P.S. A picture with Dad from one of my birthdays after starting @SkyrootA.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@godbole_shilpa Agree. So much pariksha pe charcha but none when the pariksha went wrong! Entire controversy could have been avoided if it was appropriately addressed at the start itself

[Parimal @Fintech03]

If you walk into the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City & look up at the massive, world-famous frescoes painted by Diego Rivera, you will see something that should make every Indian’s jaw drop.

Among the painted Mexican revolutionaries, farmers & national heroes sits an Indian man with intense eyes, sitting at a long wooden table, breaking bread with poor peasants.

He is not a diplomat. He is not a movie star. He was a wanted fugitive from Maharashtra whom the British Empire spent decades trying to hunt down & the man who quietly revolutionized global agriculture before the world even knew what the "Green Revolution" was.

His name was Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje.

Born in 1884 in Wardha, Maharashtra, Khankhoje grew up on stories of the 1857 uprising. While other kids played games, young Pandurang spent his teens founding secret societies & training in martial arts. Inspired by Lokmanya Tilak, he reached a radical conclusion early in life: To defeat an empire, you need military training & global allies.

In 1906, penniless & under British surveillance, he fled India on a ship. He worked his way through Japan & San Francisco, eventually enrolling at the Mount Tamalpais Military Academy in California while earning a degree in agriculture at Oregon State University.

In Oregon, he co-founded the Ghadar Party, the legendary international movement aimed at overthrowing British rule in India through armed revolt.

During World War I, Khankhoje traveled across Europe & the Middle East, attempting to recruit Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army to turn their guns against their colonizers. But the revolt failed. British intelligence put a massive price on his head. He could not go back to India. He could not stay in the West. He was a man w/o a country.

Exiled & on the run, Khankhoje slipped across the border into Mexico in the 1920s. Mexico was rebuilding after its own bloody revolution & its rural population was dying of starvation & drought.

Khankhoje realized something profound: An empire does not just conquer with guns; it conquers through hunger. If you want a nation to be truly free, you have to feed its people.

Appointed as a prof at the National School of Agriculture in Texcoco, he threw himself into plant genetics. Working under harsh conditions with limited funding, he did something extraordinary:

- Taming the Wild Corn: He crossbred wild grass (teosinte) with domestic maize, creating high-yielding, drought-resistant hybrid corn that produced multiple ears per plant instead of just 1.

- Frost-Proof Wheat: He developed new strains of high-yield wheat capable of surviving extreme Mexican weather & blights.

- Schools for the Poor: He did not lock his research in academic journals. He founded the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura (Free Agricultural Schools), teaching impoverished Mexican farmers hands-on genetics, soil conservation & yield optimization.

His high-yield crops transformed Mexican farming. Decades later, when American scientist Norman Borlaug came to Mexico & developed the high-yield dwarf wheat that kicked off the global Green Revolution, he built directly upon the foundation of plant genetics laid by Pandurang Khankhoje.

In 1947, India finally won its independence. The British were gone.

Now an elderly scientist globally celebrated across Latin America, Pandurang Khankhoje packed his bags & came home to Nagpur, eager to offer his life's work to build the agricultural backbone of a newborn India.

The bureaucracy of newly independent India did not know what to do with him. His radical revolutionary past frightened bureaucrats; his foreign academic achievements were ignored. He was given no major agricultural policy role, no national honors & no platform :((

When he passed away in Nagpur in 1967, his passing barely made a ripple in the local newspapers. His neighbors knew him simply as a quiet, retired old man who used to live abroad.

Today, if you ask an Indian agricultural student who fathered modern crop hybridization, they will quote Western scientists. Almost no 1 in Maharashtra/Delhi knows the name Pandurang Khankhoje.

But 1000s of KMs away in Mexico City, inside the halls of govt, his face remains painted on the wall, immortalized by Diego Rivera as a symbol of unity, knowledge, and freedom.

He was erased from the history books of the country he fought to liberate, but the soil of Mexico still remembers the Indian ghost who taught them how to feed a nation.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@docbhooshan The fact that even in 21st century, age of AI, a country boasting about IT industry, we have the issue of paper leak, speaks a lot about the will to fix the system! Unfortunately, everyone seems to be more focused on finding the scapegoat rather than solution.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@Amrita_Sitar So shocked! May his soul rest in peace!

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours.

This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12.

381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find.

India sent five kids.

All five came back with gold.

Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad.

We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :)

That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them.

Now here is what the exam actually was.

Two papers. Each five hours long.

The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs.

The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids.

That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer.

Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours.

HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too.

Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO.

Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze.

In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver.

Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade.

Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018.

So who built this.

The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy.

They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane.

The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai.

The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri.

Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra.

This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own.

The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast.

That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world.

But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think.

That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years.

So yes, be proud. Loudly.

HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD.

But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India.

I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have.

But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying.

Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@godbole_shilpa The fact that country does not have strict daycare laws and regulations for highlighted here.

[Lalit Rathi - LKR @lalitinvestor]

My mind is blown away reading the 109 page SEBI order on Rajesh Exports… not that its surprising given some in last few yrs had called it a fraud but shocked on the size of it and how a Rs 3,000 crore market cap company may potentially be heading towards ZERO.! 😲

This is not a normal accounting issue. This is SEBI practically alleging that out of nearly Rs 15.45 lakh crore consolidated revenue reported over 5 years, close to Rs 15.15 lakh crore revenue itself may have been misrepresented. Yes, you read it right - lakh crore.

And the most shocking part?
The core operating subsidiary, Valcambi SA, whose numbers supposedly drove the entire global scale of the group, reportedly showed only a few hundred crores of standalone revenue annually in audited Swiss accounts. Meanwhile, the holding structure above it magically showed revenues running into several lakh crores.

SEBI’s allegation is brutally simple in layman terms: A refining business which allegedly earned only processing charges/value addition was shown at group level as if the company owned and traded the entire value of gold flowing through the system.

Imagine a toll booth operator claiming ownership of every car crossing the highway and booking the value of all cars as its own revenue. That is broadly what SEBI is questioning here.

The order repeatedly mentions:
• No proper invoices
• No customer/vendor level breakup
• No ERP access
• No journal dumps
• No confirmations
• Missing subsidiary financials
• “Swiss confidentiality laws” being cited to deny information

SEBI has also highlighted that even the forensic auditor BDO India faced severe non cooperation.

What makes this even more serious is that this is an ex parte interim order. Meaning SEBI has passed the order based on its own investigation and material gathered, without relying on cooperation from the company side. Regulators generally do not go this aggressive unless they believe the findings are extremely serious.

The statutory auditor named in the order is BSD & Co, a mid sized Bengaluru based audit firm along with P V Ramana Reddy & Co. SEBI has specifically mentioned non submission of working papers and missing subsidiary records.

Another fascinating angle:
The annual reports reportedly show borrowings of around Rs 1,000 crore, but there is very limited clarity on which banks gave these loans and against what underlying audited cash flows.

This may go down as one of the most dramatic accounting fraud allegations ever seen in Indian capital markets post Satyam..

If even a fraction of SEBI’s findings sustain, this is not just a corporate governance failure. This is a complete collapse of reported financial reality.

Absolutely insane reading.!

You can read the order here - https://t.co/RWP594BT2r

#Rajeshexports

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@miteshbgala That was epic. Hahaha. The only flight I ever missed

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

Parents reached airport 5 hours in advance for a flight with flying time 5 hours.

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@godbole_shilpa I have had all of them in my family and even in their 80s the names have stuck. My own father has also been called Bal Ajoba

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@thefynprint @ActusDei LINK

[Neha Thakur @neha217]

@godbole_shilpa The look by Aisha on that question gives perfect answer