Pavan P Sethia

Dad, Husband, Son. Simplifying travel. Email me at pavan [at] travllr [dot] com

[AstroCounselKK 🇮🇳 @AstroCounselKK]

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Qutbuddin Aibak, the first ruler of the Slave Dynasty in the Delhi Sultanate, died after falling from a galloping horse.

But is it really possible that a general who rode a horse for the first time at the age of 11 and fought countless battles on horseback could die from a galloping horse?

Real History vs. Fabricated Story

When Qutbuddin Aibak plundered Rajputana, he killed the king of Mewar and captured Prince Karan Singh. Along with the looted wealth and the prince, he also took the prince's horse "Shubhrak" to Lahore.

In Lahore, Karan Singh tried to escape and was captured. Qutbuddin ordered his beheading and, to add insult to injury, ordered a polo match played using the dead prince's head as a ball.

On the day of the beheading, Qutbuddin arrived at the venue riding Shubhrak. Upon seeing its master Karan Singh, the horse bolted uncontrollably, causing Qutbuddin to fall from the horse. Shubhrak kicked the fallen Qutbuddin with a powerful kick. The powerful blows to the chest and head proved fatal. Qutbuddin Aibak died instantly in 1210 CE.

Everyone was stunned. Shubhrak ran towards Karan Singh, and taking advantage of the ensuing chaos, the prince jumped onto his valiant horse, which immediately took off running and began the most arduous race of his life.

It was a continuous race for almost more than three days, finally stopping at the gates of the kingdom of Mewar. When the prince dismounted, Shubhrak stood still like a statue. Karan Singh lovingly stroked the horse's head, but was shocked when Shubhrak fell to the ground.

The powerful horse managed to save its master and safely escorted him back to his kingdom before succumbing to his injuries.

We've read about Chetak, but the story of Shubhrak is beyond belief! Facts like this never make it into the curriculum of our modern education system. Most of us haven't even heard of it. Have we?

It is permanently buried in history. It's time to share the glory.

🙏🏻🇮🇳Jai Hind🙏🏻

[Anubhav Gupta @anubhavgupta_ji]

Woahh!!!!
What a wonderful & logical take against reservation system, eating India's growth.

Whole atrocities lies busted.
This is fire.🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

It must be appreciated 👏🏻👏🏻@ajeetbharti

[Prafull Billore @_prafullbillore]

What Japan taught us this World Cup

Winning is celebrated. Character is remembered.

Japan reminded us that respect isn't reserved for victory. It is revealed in defeat.

They bowed their heads, apologised to their people, cleaned the stadium before leaving, and walked away with grace even after heartbreak.

In a world obsessed with trophies, Japan reminded us that humility, accountability and dignity are victories too.

They may have lost the match, but they won something far greater. They won hearts. They won respect. They won the admiration of millions.

You don't just play the game beautifully.

You live beautifully.

[Dr. Lavanya Vemsani Ph.D. @ProfVemsani]

They told us our ancestors are not our ancestors! our language is not our language, our culture is not our culture! Our epics are not our history but that of invaders. But who were the invaders? There is nothing! No race no invaders! What liers! #NoAryans they spin tales out of thin air.

[Tehxi @yajnshri]

”‘More Than 80% of Japanese Gods Are Indian Gods’ 🇮🇳🇯🇵

Former Japanese Ambassador to India Yasukuni Enoki explains the deep cultural ties between India and Japan and how the ancient Siddham script is still used in Japan.”

[Nandini @NBDwrites]

I was fourteen, walking home from school in Paris with my French-American friend. Summer was around the corner and the heat was relentless.

‘You must be used to this heat,’ she said.

‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘We lived in the hills in India before we came to Paris.’

‘Hills? I didn’t know India had hills.’

‘We have the Himalayas,” I had replied. ‘The highest mountains in the world.’

She stopped dead.

‘You’ve got to be kidding! The highest mountains are in America.’

That expression of absolute certainty is etched into my memory even today.

Twenty years later, when I met her again in New York, I reminded her of that conversation. We couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing.

So anyway that afternoon we went home, and I opened my Philips Atlas and showed her the Himalayas.

‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘ I’d always wondered about that weird name. I just assumed it was some Native American name.’

A few weeks later, in geography class, while studying the Alps, our teacher announced they were the highest mountains in the world.

My newly enlightened friend proudly corrected her.

‘Actually, the Himalayas are.’

The teacher shot me a look that instantly identified the culprit behind this inconvenient fact.

Then, without missing a beat, she recovered.
‘Yes… but the Himalayas are the newest highest mountains. The Alps were the oldest highest mountains.’

Case closed.

At fourteen, I learnt one of life’s great lessons: The West doesn’t just write history, geography, science. It often decides it.

If something is ancient, extraordinary or foundational, somehow it must have originated in Europe or at the very least be explained through a European lens.

The Rig Veda became “Aryan.” A Middle Eastern Jew named Jesus acquired blond hair and blue eyes.
Even Panini, at one point, seemed to belong to everyone except India.

Now, apparently, Panini is Pakistani.

Progress, I suppose.
From ‘ that’s impossible’ to ‘it was ours all along.’

The script changes. The narrator doesn’t.

#SundayMusings

[Lorwen Harris Nagle, PhD @LORWEN108]

I’m American.

After my PhD, I went to India.

What I experienced dismantled my Western worldview.

Here are 8 lessons that permanently rewired how I see life:👇

1. Death is not hidden from life.

[Nick Adams @NickAdamsinUSA]

No apology needed. The international media has been lying about the United States for decades!

We are just glad you came to see for yourself how amazing America truly is!

[Ashley Schendel @ashleyschendel]

I love seeing what people from other countries put on their USA bucket lists because it is not the stuff we think it will be.

They’re not saying “Grand Canyon” or “New York City.”

They’re saying Buc-ee’s, a Big Gulp, Texas BBQ, baseball, a rodeo, a drive thru, Chipotle, a gun range, and watching something completely ridiculous happen in a Walmart parking lot.

And the funny part is they’re not wrong.

America is so normal to us that we forget how bizarre and entertaining it probably looks from the outside.

If somebody came here and asked you for the real American experience, what are you making them do first?

[Raúl Conte @raulcontev]

Tener un bebé en 1990:

- Te enterabas del embarazo cuando tu mujer vomitaba 3 días seguidos
- Nacía, le ponías nombre y a la casa
- La habitación tenía una cuna y ya
- La ropa pasaba de hermano a hermano
- Era un bebé, no un "proyecto de crianza"

Tener un bebé en 2026 ↓↓

[Akash Krishna @AkashKrishna]

Narayana Murthy is nothing more than a glorified Program Manager who was at the right place at the right time. Low cost, high volume deliverables kept them afloat for decades. Even the minimum wage in the US two decades ago is significantly higher than what an engineer gets paid at Infosys to this day.

The fact that Infosys has remained a sweat shop since its inception with zero softwares brought to the market and transforming into a retirement home of IT coolies whose only aspiration in life is a work trip to the US, speaks about how socialist the Infosys philosophy is, and how low agency and mediocre India’s software developers were for 30 years.

How a genius like Sikka ended up at Infosys is quite astounding.

Albeit, the early employees gained from hitting the jackpot with the shares enabling thousands of them to become millionaires.

And today, we have brilliant minds with high agency, willing to take the risk of innovating and going global with their ideas, while Infosys continues to swim in the cesspool of mediocrity, paying shit salaries, while Murthy and his boomer stock of co founders and executives continue to accumulate insane wealth, while projecting modesty on the outside.

Classic champagne socialist behaviour. Modesty is just the facade because they always knew, they never deserved the wealth they accumulated and they wilfully prevented people from taking high stakes risks, because they feared their profit margins would reduce if the company innovated and created the need for investing in talent who wouldn’t settle for the salaries of a fuel station employee.

Granted, they employed lakhs of people and lakhs of families went from lower middle class to upper middle class or upper class even.

That way even Indian Railways can claim credit for the same reasons.

In between all this, we have somehow bred a generation of people who only care about increasing their networth by hook or crook, and not willing to put in the effort and intellectual rigour in building world class products.

And we expect to compete with Silicon Valley with a handful of genius entrepreneurs who shunned mediocrity.

With the capital Infosys had, they could have easily setup their own Y-Combinator and used the ideas coming out of it to become force multipliers creating an organic ecosystem of innovation labs across the likes of TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro et al, and by now, India would have been on par with the US for technological innovation. But we had Narayana Murthy who thought AI was hyped and rejected the idea to be an early investor in Open AI.

And this guy is supposed to be a technology leader. 😂

[Abhijit Majumder @abhijitmajumder]

This is gold.
This is what makes the BJP so very special.

[dr Abhi @dr_abhi_9]

@himantabiswa @aravind a CM of state and probably right hand of HM of India reads your analysis. Bro’s aura on tweeter is unbeatable. Looking forward to gain exciting knowledge and enlightenment by your analysis.

[Himanta Biswa Sarma @himantabiswa]

Thanks Aravind! I do read your analysis sometimes, spot on . Good job. Keep going.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A Chinese monk once walked from China to India. It took him eight years, crossing deserts and mountain ranges, just to attend a university. When he finally arrived, the gatekeepers rejected 7 out of every 10 people who showed up.

His name was Xuanzang, and the university was Nalanda. He left China in 629 CE and reached the gate in 637. If he hadn't written the journey down in a book, we'd dismiss the story as a legend today.

Nalanda had been operating for over 200 years by the time Xuanzang walked through the gate. An Indian king named Kumaragupta I founded it around 427 CE, back when most of Europe was still picking up the pieces after Rome fell. Oxford would not start teaching for another 669 years. Bologna, Europe's oldest university, would not open until 1088.

At its peak, the campus held 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. That works out to five students per teacher, a ratio most modern universities can't hit even today. Students came from China, Korea, Tibet, Japan, Persia, Turkey, and Indonesia. Tuition cost nothing. The king had assigned entire villages to Nalanda, and the produce and rent from those villages paid for everything.

Students studied medicine (what we now call Ayurveda), math, astronomy, logic, grammar, metalworking, politics, and the art of war. This was a Buddhist monastery with a course on military strategy. Aryabhata, the mathematician who first proposed that the earth spins on its own axis around the year 499, may have led Nalanda in the 6th century.

The library was its own complex of three separate buildings. One of them stood nine stories tall. Tibetan records estimate it held around 9 million manuscripts, every single one copied by hand. They had no printing press, no mass-produced paper, nothing but ink, dried palm leaves, and monks who copied texts for decades on end.

The end came in 1193 CE. An invading army led by Bakhtiyar Khilji rode in, killed thousands of monks, and set the library on fire. The fires burned for three months. A Persian historian wrote that smoke hung over the hills like a dark cloud for days. Centuries of work in medicine, math, and astronomy went with it. Most of it was unique to Nalanda and gone forever.

The ruins sat forgotten for 619 years. In 1812, a Scottish surveyor named Francis Buchanan-Hamilton came upon them while mapping the region. He had no idea what he'd stumbled onto. Another 50 years passed before anyone identified the site as Nalanda. UNESCO made it a World Heritage site in 2016. The new Nalanda University opened on nearby land in 2014, and its 485-acre net-zero campus was formally inaugurated in June 2024.

The original Nalanda operated for 766 years before Khilji shut it down. Harvard, for scale, is 390 years old. If Nalanda had survived, it would be turning 1,600 next year.