Sameera

Jack of few trades, master of absolutely none. Sports fanatic. Mainly Cricket, Football, Basketball, Tennis. Not necessarily in that order.

[Sameera @sameera79]

මගේ එකා පශ්චාත් යුද සමයේ ලමයෙක්. සමහර දවස්වලට ඉස්සර කතා කියද්දී මම ඒකට කියනවා ඉස්සර කොළඹ බෝම්බ පිපිරුවාම අපිට ඉස්කෝලේ නිවාඩු හම්බවුන හැටි. අම්මලා ගාල්ලේ ඉන්දන් බය උන හැටි.
දැන් හෙට ඒකාගේ ජීවිතේ පලවෙනි පාරට බෝම්බ පිපිරුන හින්දා ඉස්කෝලේ යන්නේ නෑ. අපි ආපහු හිටපු තැනටම ඇවිල්ලා. 😔

[Vaibhav Bodana @VaibhavSpace]

Meet Ashoke Sen,
a Bengali-medium schoolboy from Kolkata who applied to only two American PhD programs because those two let him skip the application fee up front.

He took his BSc at Presidency College in 1975, then a master’s at IIT Kanpur. Stony Brook accepted him, then he joined.

On 22 October 2026 he gave the Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture at Stockholm University, “Gravity from strings and strings from gravity.” The Klein medal comes with that lecture, first Indian physicist to receive the Klein Medal. He also won the inaugural 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize, one of nine, and the 2014 Dirac Medal.

During his PhD, almost three years went by with nothing moving but his plan was ordinary. He read lots of books and review articles, went sightseeing with friends, then hoped it would work out. Something began to click near the end.

“90% of the time I am stuck!” ~ Ashoke Sen

Long stretches of nothing moving are normal in hard work.

[Abhishek Mukherjee @ovshake42]

Said this before, saying this again. Does not have to be Dostoyevsky or Dickens. Calvin & Hobbes teaches more about life than all AI slop and self-help books (also slop) put together.

[Sameera @sameera79]

Normally you have a few drinks while watching a Sri Lanka match. That was longtime ago. Today you went to a party despite there was a SL match, because there was no hope in hell you have a chance in it and end up pausing a fucking Oktoberfest because of a monumental run chase.
Jest Sri Lanakan cricket fan things…

[Johns. @CricCrazyJohns]

🚨 SRI LANKA CREATED HISTORY IN RAWALPINDI 🤯

They have chased down 430 runs against England, one of the greatest run-chases ever in ODI history.

We have witnessed peak ODI run-chase 🫡

[ICC @ICC]

𝑨 𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒖𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒍 𝒘𝒊𝒏 🇱🇰

Sri Lanka complete the second-highest chase in Men’s ODI history against England 😲

📝: https://t.co/M0k2qBIEay

[Sameera @sameera79]

Oktoberfest was stopped for few minutes because we effing didn’t care for music or alcohol for several minutes. 😂🕺🏻

[Madushka Balasuriya @frommadtoworse]

....can't believe what I've just seen. That might be the single-most unlikely chase in the history of the game - bar none.

[Sameera @sameera79]

@metaltarian @tmaxftw @jtefel1 @nickofnz Apparently not good education. 😀

[Sameera @sameera79]

@tmaxftw @jtefel1 @nickofnz Evidently none of you buggers can point to Sri Lanka in a map, let alone ever been there.

[Hasitha Liyanage @h_liyan]

It's ok to have Starlink in SL, but nothing critical should depend on it. Historically we know that if a country's critical infrastructure (e.g. fuel supply, banking, internet) becomes too dependent on a US controlled entity, it can and will be used for political leverage.

[Sanjiva Weerawarana @sanjiva]

For those arguing for Starlink to play a national role:

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Ahmad @AhmadFPR]

Cats are hilarious. It's standing in front of one of the most lethal snakes in the world and it turns around to see if anyone is watching. Most impressive creatures on the planet.

[Sameera @sameera79]

If I live long enough, a golden retriever is one thing I will definitely spend my money on after retirement.. 😍

[dogs so cute that could save the world @dogssaveworld]

put on a little crown and waited for the birthday party 🎉

[Sameera @sameera79]

NPP don’t need more supporters when they have opposition like this. 😂

[NewsWire 🇱🇰 @NewsWireLK]

Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP Jagath Vithana criticized Metro buses, calling it unfair that passengers must stand while paying double the fare.

“Passengers have to stand in Metro buses, and the ticket price is also doubled. Isn’t that unfair? Even Buddhist monks have to travel while standing,” adding that Metro bus operators should not be allowed to act arbitrarily in this manner.

“We can carry 48 passengers right now. According to their decisions, about 80 passengers are standing and traveling. How much injustice is happening today? A person who stands and travels also pays double the cost and a person who sits and travels pays the exact same amount,” he added.

He also noted, “When looking at fuel consumption, it takes two liters of diesel per kilometer. Why? Because we didn’t bring electric buses, If we had brought hybrid buses that operate using electricity and diesel, which are powerful and cause less pollution, it would have been much more successful. He added that if advice had been taken from the public, it would have been much better.

“It is good to provide facilities, but even more than facilities, the clergy shouldn’t have been left out. The clergy have to struggle. Yesterday, a very senior head of our sangha gave me a letter, stating that the clergy have to travel standing. In this country, when we talk about the clergy, it’s not just Buddhist monks; Catholic priests, Muslim maulvis and everyone else is included,” he added.

Vithana also questioned whether the new buses would be cost-effective, noting that they would still depreciate over time and require maintenance, including the replacement of spare tyres and tubes. (Newswire)

[Sameera @sameera79]

@DArmChairCritic That’s a question when we have competent T20 batters to consider instead. Not when it’s a fucking lottery who will perform on any given day.

[Sameera @sameera79]

The question should be isn’t this enough? This is a joke. Who tf wants be a bowler while watching this??

[Harsha Bhogle @bhogleharsha]

How much is enough? We asked that in Guwahati and we are asking that here in Ranchi.

[Sameera @sameera79]

@RexClementine If I remember correctly there was Kandy match featuring him. Absolutely terrifying fast bowler on his day. Our top order folded like pack of cards.

[Sameera @sameera79]

@RehanJayawick Who is this and what have you done with Rehan? 😀

[Sameera @sameera79]

@rothbourne It’s not been available on any main streaming platform is a travesty.