Dr P Thiaga Rajan (PTR)

Former MLA (Madurai Central ('16-'26); TN Minister (Finance & HR '21-'23; IT & Digital Service '23-'26). Lovedale, Vikaasa, NITT, UB, MIT Sloan; Lehman, SCB

[Dr P Thiaga Rajan (PTR) @ptrmadurai]

𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗿: The entire Kumbabishegam ceremony today, has been directed by the current TVK Government through its Officers without considering any inputs from the Trustees. This has been done in direct contravention of both the relevant Tamil Nadu Acts & Statutes and of multiple rulings of the Madras High Court. I have been forwarded multiple social media posts this morning from devotees complaining of the lack of access to the event. While some of this may have happened under any government, the incumbent government must take full responsibility for today’s shortcomings, given their complete exclusion of the Trustees (who had experience with prior events)from the planning process, and decision to conduct the proceedings with Officers that had no prior experience of similar events.

I am also duty-bound to note that over 95% of the massive efforts undertaken over the past three years to perform this unique renovation – which included the restoration of the fire-damaged Veera Vasantha Rayar Mandapam – were undertaken during the previous DMK Government’s tenure of 2021 to 2026.

[Ramesh Srivats @rameshsrivats]

The EDF (Export Declaration Form) rules are now in effect, and it seems like RBI and banks have conspired to create a new hell. Or actually 5 hells.

I consult for an American company. Raised October invoice. Received the Inward remittance. And bang! Mail from @HDFC_Bank detailing everything needed before the payment can be processed.

Let me tell you what the 5 hells are:

1. The hell of confusion – RBI clarified last month that the EDF rules do not apply to individuals. But looks like they haven’t told the banks. And CAs also don’t seem to know. There’s no official communication on who is exempt. Last I checked, I was an individual. No company, no LLP. But HDFC still wants me to file the EDF to credit my payment.

2. The hell of complexity – See the attached pic of the form the bank has sent in excel. It has 5 sheets. To be filled and submitted. Some abstruse acronyms like “AD” - no clue what it means. Some fields are mandatory. Some fields are to be filled by the bank. No idea which is what. And it needs a physical signature. Which leads to...

3. The hell of paperwork - They also sent a pdf with a bunch of request letters. I’m supposed to choose the right letter, print, sign, scan and submit. Creating more paper today is incredibly silly. And, I suppose, someone in the bank will have to upload all this somewhere. Reminds me of those hand-filled immigration forms. Pointless.

4. The hell of repetition – At least for me, most of the details are constant. One client, one payment. If it’s a one-time exercise, fine. I’ll grit my teeth and get it done. But no. These details have to be given month after month. Else… no payment will be credited.

5. The hell of unpreparedness – It would have been simple enough for RBI or HDFC to create an online portal for this. With dropdowns, saved formats, contextual help, etc. to at least make this easy. But that would be too convenient, no? So, they’ve chosen to dump the entire burden on the taxpayer.

I have no opinion or understanding of why this is needed. Maybe it is critical information. Okay! But why make the process so confusing and painful?

And poor communication has meant that the banks have just passed on the pain to the exporter, and even CAs can’t help.

Basically RBI & HDFC feel I should consult less, and comply more. Maybe my client will also agree :)

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: "Speculative data center debt is being repackaged and sold to pension and retirement funds, university endowments, and other institutional investors in a manner eerily reminiscent of the subprime bubble," per AFR

[M.K.Stalin @mkstalin]

How many protestors can this government detain? How many young voices can the BJP silence?

The more young people they jail, the more ordinary citizens, with no political affiliation, will take to the streets and show them the true power of the people!

Solidarity with @AshutoshRanka and @SauravDassss! The DMK stands ready to provide them with all necessary legal representation and support. ✊🏾

#CJP #GyaneshKumarMustGo

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

The US stock market has never been this fragmented:

The 52-week correlation between the equal-weighted S&P 500 and the S&P 500 index is down to 0.67, its lowest level on record.

This measures how closely the performance of the equal-weighted S&P 500 tracks the cap-weighted index, with a lower reading indicating a growing gap between the broader market and mega-cap stocks.

The correlation has declined -0.25 points since August 2025.

By comparison, before the 2020 pandemic, this figure remained between 0.95 and 0.99 for nearly 15 years.

To put this into perspective, during the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble, this metric never declined below 0.85.

The S&P 500 is more concentrated than ever.

[PunsterX @PunsterX]

The most hilarious episode of this protest!

Delhi Police detained the driver of a bus which Delhi Police had brought to detain protesters! 🤣

[Dr P Thiaga Rajan (PTR) @ptrmadurai]

Procuring at 35/unit after cancelling previous agreements at much lower rates earlier is either staggering incompetence in administration/planning, or massive corruption. Or both...

[MacroMatrix @MacroMatrix1]

🚨Breaking

Tamil Nadu reportedly floated a tender to procure 4,500 MW of electricity from the open market to meet power demand and manage power cuts.

If the reported procurement schedule is fully utilised at ₹35 per unit, the estimated cost would be:

⚡ 3,000 MW for 6 hours: ₹63 crore
⚡ 1,500 MW for 2 hours: ₹10.5 crore

📊 Total: ₹73.5 crore per day

• 7 days: ₹514.5 crore
• 20 days: ₹1,470 crore

That is a massive potential cost for emergency power procurement.

[The Wire @thewire_in]

The Link Between TCS, SIR’s Digital Stack, and the Noel Tata-N. Chandrasekaran Tussle

S Raghotham reports
https://t.co/QqRfHHyrHe

[CPI (M) @cpimspeak]

Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas was brutally attacked by the Delhi Police. He was later dropped by the roadside, visibly injured and in distress.

DELHI POLICE HAS CROSSED ALL LIMITS!

[Dr P Thiaga Rajan (PTR) @ptrmadurai]

😁💯

[Florian Roth ⚡️ @cyb3rops]

Ah, now I get it. I thought the AI catastrophe meant a model escaping its sandbox, launching nukes or hacking the power grid.

Turns out it spots the AI debt bubble, shorts its own creators and crashes the financial system with trading bots.

The singularity is a margin call.

[Sushant Singh @SushantSin]

"A Supreme Court that cannot secure the reopening of its own metro station will struggle to persuade citizens that it can secure their liberty, their speech or their protest." @sanjayuvacha hath a point

https://t.co/tUgUltwk1s

[N. Ram @nramind]

Don’t miss this editorial page lead article by Srinivasan Ramani & Pon Vasanth B.A. in The Hindu (October 9, 2026). The article explains in clear, precise, and accessible terms what a massive scandal — an exercise fatally flawed in conception and design, and deliberately exclusionary in impact — the Gyanesh Kumar-directed Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was. It also draws attention to the Supreme Court of India’s failure in the big test and expresses the hope that it will now act decisively to undo the damage.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your dog spends about 20% of the night awake and its sleep quality doesn't drop at all. In the bed-sharing arrangement, you were always the fragile one.

Dogs are polyphasic sleepers. Their sleep comes in short bouts stacked across the whole day, and their brains are built to surface, check the room, and sink back under in seconds. Humans run on 90 minute cycles where a single bad 3am wake-up can cost an hour. Same mattress, two completely different operating systems.

A Mayo Clinic study put activity trackers on 40 owner-dog pairs for a week. The dogs hit 85% sleep efficiency whether they slept on the bed or the floor. The humans managed 81%, and their number moved depending on where the dog was. Dog sleep was bulletproof. Human sleep bent around the dog.

Then wearables blew up the sample sizes. A 2026 analysis of 11,733 WHOOP users across 1.6 million nights found that on dog-in-the-room nights, people slept about 10 minutes longer, resting heart rate dropped about 1 beat per minute, and heart rate variability rose. There were a few extra micro-wakeups, around 0.4 per night. The nervous system downshifted anyway. It read the dog as safety.

A 2025 study ran sleep EEG on family dogs and found the inversion. Dogs sleep measurably worse when their owners aren't in the room. You are your dog's sleep aid, and apparently its main sleep disruption too.

The evolutionary read is that this deal is tens of thousands of years old. Humans who slept near dogs could afford deeper, more vulnerable sleep because something with better hearing was handling the night watch. Co-sleeping researchers think dogs literally expanded how much uninterrupted sleep early humans could get.

The dog takes the broken sleep so you don't have to. The trade predates agriculture, and your heart rate still drops a beat the moment one curls up at your feet.

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

Gems of @ECISVEEP @ceo_karnataka!
Two voters reported each other dead just one day apart.

11th June: Mallikarjun reports Viramma dead.
12th June: Viramma reports Mallikarjun dead.

Wait! How does someone declared dead file an objection the very next day? This raises serious questions. Was a false death claim made, or was a form filed in someone else's name?

And this isn’t an isolated case. There are 334 such pairs (668 voters) with both voters in each pair registered at the same booth and each reporting the other dead.

[Tony Joseph @tjoseph0010]

May be courts should consider putting up as their motto 'What's The Urgency?'; 'Heavens Won't Fall'; and 'You Can Seek Justice Next Time'.

[Michael Burry Stock Tracker ♟ @burrytracker]

Breaking: Michael Burry says the AI boom is running on one giant loop and time is running out

Here's his breakdown:

1. Burry shared a report from Wall Street lender Ares tracking $573B of AI financing from the last 12 months

2. All of it runs through just 8 companies: Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom and Nvidia

3. They lend to each other, guarantee each other's debt and buy from each other, so one company's loan is backed by another company's promise to keep spending

4. Every deal depends on one thing: AI spending never slowing down

5. If AI revenue disappoints for even one season, the guarantees could all get called at once, right when the companies backing them are at their weakest

6. Burry says it's the same circular financing that turned the 2000 telecom fiber boom into a bust

Burry claims the stock market in the first stage of grief and the crash is soon

[தமிழச்சி @ThamizhachiTh]

05 - 10 - 2026. It was a pleasure meeting fellow MPs Thambi Thiru @ArunNehru_DMK Thirumigu @MenakaGuruswamy and Former Minister of Information and Technology of Tamil Nadu @ptrmadurai at the residence of the @AusHCIndia. These interactions are always special; exchanging thoughts and sharing conversations beyond the formalities of the day.

@arivalayam

[Nitin Sethi @nit_set]

SIR Investigation: The mysterious 16.4 lakh voters added to Uttar Pradesh Roll

Flouting the law, ECI has hidden names and details of 16.4 lakh voters added to Uttar Pradesh's voter roll.

That's 18.5% of the total voters added to the final voter roll in the state which soon goes to polls.

And some irreconcilable numbers emerge from SIR in UP...

@ayushikar1998 and @TweetSumedha investigated for The Reporters' Collective @reporters_co

https://t.co/HdKty6jNj5

1/2

[Sanjay Jha @JhaSanjay]

HOW THE SUPREME COURT FAILED INDIA:
BEFORE SIR, THERE WAS THE ELECTORAL BONDS STORY. REMEMBER?

On 15 February 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously declared the Electoral Bonds Scheme UNCONSTITUTIONAL We clapped.
A landmark judgment. But.

But extraordinarily late.

The scheme operated since 2018. Thousands of crores had already flowed anonymously into political parties. And India was weeks away from the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

It raises a fundamental question: Why did constitutional scrutiny of something so critical to electoral democracy take so long? It was bizarre.

But there is an even bigger unfinished story.

THE SCHEME WAS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. IN THAT CASE, WHAT ABOUT THE MONEY?

The Supreme Court stopped further Electoral Bonds and ordered disclosure of donor data. Fair enough.

But thousands of crores already encashed by political parties were not frozen, put into escrow or ordered returned.

Why? This is the billion dollar question.

If secrecy in political financing was unconstitutional, and there was potential for money to influence policy, why wasn’t there a judicially supervised examination of money already received? Temporarily, they had to be frozen. It was like the cops telling a thief who stole diamonds that we caught you, but please keep the jewelry. It was a joke.

And remember who overwhelmingly benefited. The BJP was by far the largest recipient of Electoral Bond funding. That money was available during one of India’s most consequential elections.

The unconstitutional pipeline was shut.
But the proceeds already delivered through it remained with the recipients.

THEN CAME THE QUID-PRO-QUO QUESTION

Once bond purchasers were identified, serious questions emerged about patterns involving political donations, government contracts, regulatory decisions and investigative-agency action.

Surely they demanded a prompt probe. Yet when a court-monitored SIT investigation was sought, the Supreme Court declined.

So ask yourself:,

Was every suspicious transaction investigated?
Was quid pro quo established—or disproved?
Were potentially connected government contracts and regulatory concessions scrutinised?
Was anyone held accountable?

Declaring the mechanism unconstitutional was only half the job. Democracy needed to know what happened through that mechanism while it existed.

AND THIS MATTERS RIGHT NOW: #SIR

While India is consumed by SIR, remember: democracy isn’t compromised only at the ballot box. It can also be compromised through money, contracts, regulatory discretion, institutional access and corporate-political proximity.

That is why emerging questions around corporate power, including the Tata Sons dispute, must be examined with evidence. That TCS, a Tata IT behemoth formerly led by N Chandrasekaran is the SIR’s technical / software vendor becomes germane.

If credible evidence establishes political proximity, ask:

Who funded whom?
Who received government contracts?
Who received regulatory or environmental clearances?
Were normal procedures followed?
Was any public institution influenced?
What’s the role of RBI, Charity Commissioner etc?

All contracts connected with something as sacred as India’s electoral rolls demand maximum transparency. No matter how powerful the rich and the famous are. Simple.

There could be a powerful connection between these controversies. 140 cr people deserve to know the truth.

SIR asks: WHO GETS TO VOTE?

Electoral Bonds ask: WHO GETS TO FUND THOSE WE VOTE FOR?

And corporate-government relationships raise the third question:

WHAT DOES THAT MONEY OR ACCESS BUY?

India’s democracy needs a permanent stress test. Get on the treadmill.

Wherever those trails intersect with political power, ask questions. Because democracy doesn’t die only when votes disappear. It also dies when money becomes invisible, institutions stop asking question and accountability disappears with them.

Over to the Supreme Court. India is watching. And no one is above scrutiny. No one.

[Arvind Gunasekar @arvindgunasekar]

While ECI in its statement on Sept 26 said that “The declaration attached to Form 6 for SIR has been upheld by the SC”, today SC has clarified that they have not approved the modified Form 6.

All these while CEC Gyanesh Kumar was defending himself with the argument that there was no illegality in modifying Form 6 as SC itself has upheld it. That defence fell flat today.

Reading this clarification from SC along with the objection from both the Election Commissioners, shouldn’t CEC Gyanesh Kumar be held responsible for unilaterally changing Form 6 ?