Darsh shah

Product @ Tangoe| Here to learn

[Narayani Gurunathan @Narayani07]

There are exceptionally gifted people.

There exceptionally consistent people.

From a distance, the two can look very similar.

[VivekTaru @kendheswapnil]

He doesn't take slow walks because brisk walks have more health benefits.

He doesn't sit on a park bench doing nothing because that time could be used more productively.

He doesn't read for pleasure, only for self-improvement.

He measures every meal in protein, calories, and micronutrients.

He has optimized every facet of his life for more knowledge, more health, more money, and more success.

Every hour must produce a return.

He is a slave.

[Yavanika Shah @yavanikashah]

The more I travel, the more I realise every country sells a fantasy from the outside.

The West sells order, efficiency, privacy, personal space. And for a while, especially when you first begin travelling, it feels intoxicating. You start believing geography is the missing piece of happiness.

Then somewhere around day 10, the gloss wears off.
The streets are cleaner, yes. The systems work better, yes. But life can also feel strangely distant. Predictable. Quiet in a way that slowly starts feeling lonely instead of peaceful.

India, on the other hand, is overstimulating to the point of absurdity. We complain about the traffic, the noise, the chaos, the pollution, and often rightfully so. But underneath all of that is a kind of emotional density that is hard to replicate anywhere else in the world.

Nothing here is subtle. Not the love, not the interference, not the ambition, not the drama, not the joy.

I used to think I wanted to leave India permanently.
Now I think I just wanted access to the world. There’s a difference.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

When someone teaches you something you didn't ask to learn, your brain reacts like it's in physical pain. UCLA scientists watched it happen on brain scans in 2003. The same wiring that fires when you stub your toe also fires when someone treats you like you need fixing.

Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman ran the study and published it in Science. The brain region is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is just the fancy name for your main pain alarm. It doesn't care whether the threat is a hot stove or a friend telling you how to live.

A neuroscientist named David Rock built a framework around this in 2008. Five things make the brain feel safe in social moments: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Take away any of those and the alarm fires. Rock wrote that one of the easiest ways to dent someone's status is to give them advice they didn't ask for. Even hinting that they're doing something wrong is enough.

When people are told what to do, they often do the opposite, even when the advice was good. The psychologist Jack Brehm noticed this in 1966, and sixty years of follow-up have confirmed it. The brain is trying to keep your life feeling like your own.

Close friends cut each other off with unsolicited advice in about 70% of supportive conversations, often before the friend has even finished explaining the problem. That number comes from a 2016 study by Bo Feng and Eran Magen in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The closer the friendship, the worse it gets. And the advice tends to make them more stressed, more depressed, and more lonely, not less.

Giving advice gives the giver a sense of power, even when nobody asked for it. Michael Schaerer and his co-authors, working across Harvard, Duke, INSEAD, USC, and Singapore Management, published this in 2018 after four experiments with about 700 people. People who chase power volunteer advice more often than others. Whether the student actually improves is a side effect, if it happens at all.

So when you feel the urge to teach somebody who never asked, that urge is mostly about you. You walk away feeling a little more powerful. They walk away feeling like they were just told they can't run their own life. Most uninvited teaching is one person's ego dressed up as kindness.

[Harsh @huntheharsh]

Met a woman in her 30s interviewing after a 2 year gap. She said she got campus placed, worked in corporate for 6 years, then watched Tamasha and realised she wanted to be an artist and pursues painting full time. So she quit and did a diploma in arts.
(1/3)

[India Aesthetica @IndiaAesthetica]

Kottayil Sree Shiva Temple stepwell in Muchukunnu Kozhikode , Kerala 🔱🌳🔵🇮🇳

[Gurpriya @GurpriyaSidhu]

A lot of people grow up hearing 'we sacrificed so much for you', 'we did so much for you' instead of 'we had so much fun raising you', or 'those were the best years'.

No wonder people want to opt out of having kids given a choice.

Even aunties who want you to have kids will not sell it as something you may enjoy but as something 'you just have to do.'

For generations, kids have not been a choice for parents but duty. Everyone did duty, some did it happily, some did it gruntingly. It shows.

I was talking to an older cousin of mine and it was probably the first time I heard someone say, "I would always say have kids, we enjoyed it so much, I wish we could do it all over again."

That's how you sell the idea of having kids. Not what you may reap off them later, not what you may or may not regret later, but just that raising kids in itself is fun and meaningful.

There are parents who enjoy that process and that's how they talk about it later.

[Alok Jain ⚡ @WeekendInvestng]

With this kind of dominance, if we are not able to push faster growth, then it is never happening...
PM Modi needs a new Reforms and Growth Ministry perhaps, one that can think out of the box!

[Rujuta Diwekar @RujutaDiwekar]

The game changer for diabetes is building strength, specifically in the legs. Include strength training in your weekly exercise schedule.

#diabetes #exercise #health #strengthtraining

[The Better India @thebetterindia]

Your roof could be the reason your room feels like an oven this summer…

In a city battling rising heat, one simple idea is quietly cooling down 4,000+ homes—no AC, no heavy bills, just something we’ve always overlooked.

It starts with an empty rooftop… and turns into something far more powerful.

Watch how one man transformed roofs into cooling green spaces—and why this might be the smartest summer fix you haven’t tried yet.

Hit play & see the change for yourself.

Would you turn your rooftop into a mini farm?

Credits: livinggreensorganics on IG

#RooftopFarming #SustainableLiving #BeatTheHeat #UrbanFarming

[VivekTaru @kendheswapnil]

A lot of “leave India” advice comes from a mental model of a good life shaped by the West, where systems, predictability, and infrastructure are the primary markers of quality of life.

That’s a narrow lens.

For someone like me, India offers something else: cultural alignment.

Most of my conversations happen in my mother tongue.
My humor lands without effort.
References are shared.

The people I care about are here.
The environment feels intuitively mine.

That has real quality-of-life value; something “leave India” voices often overlook.

India also has an unusual amount of variety in everyday life: food, language, art, music, religion, and culture.

And if you have money, you can design a life with far more time autonomy. Routine tasks can be outsourced; your energy can go into things that actually matter.

So the question is: what are you optimizing for?

If your priority is social depth, cultural fit, and flexibility in how you design your life, India can be a great place to live, especially for those shaped by Indian sensibilities.

[dwi @dwiyuliann]

in my 30s, I just want a home like this. green, quiet, and a life that feels calm

[Shav Ngah ★ @shavnyuyngah]

Here’s proof that we need better layouts..

This 2,912 sq ft home in Thalassery, Kerala, fits a full family program; four bedrooms, private courtyard, lily pond, well, kitchen garden; not by building bigger but by building around three distinct functional zones organized from a central axis.

Exposed laterite walls. Clay tile roof. 35% of the wood and roof tiles salvaged from the old house that stood on the same site. Solar panels. Rainwater harvesting feeding the lily pond.

Nothing imported that didn’t need to be. Nothing wasted that could be reused.

Architects: TWO i Architects, Kannur, Kerala. Completed 2022.

The house your community has always built was never the problem. It was the decision to stop refining it.

More images in the comments 🧵

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[anand mahindra @anandmahindra]

I must confess that until recently I had never heard of Phool Dei, a spring festival that was celebrated yesterday in the villages of Uttarakhand.

Children gather fresh flowers from the hills and go from house to house placing them on doorsteps, offering a blessing for the household:

“Phool Dei, Chhamma Dei,
Deni Dwar, Bhar Bhakar…” roughly wishing the home prosperity.

In return they receive sweets.

It reminded me a little of Halloween in the U.S., where children go door to door saying “trick or treat.” But what a lovely contrast. Here the children arrive not threatening a prank, or asking first, but giving first. Flowers.

In an age when we speak so much about environmental consciousness, this graceful celebration of spring and nature deserves to be far more widely known.

Just as Holi travelled across India and the world, perhaps Phool Dei should too.

For me, the children of Uttarakhand are my #MondayMotivation

[Robin_GT @RobinGT_Real]

"Everyone" is an overstatement—those who think they can afford it and believe "Total Environment" means close to nature soon realise there is nothing remotely natural except the mud-coloured outdoor building walls. People have been waiting over 10 years for handover in some of their projects, and the gimmick of selling premium apartments and villas with an all-inclusive setup is plainly delusional. Avoid them at all costs.

[Reddit Lies @reddit_lies]

Redditor makes a prediction

[signüll @signulll]

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person.

when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that.

i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it.

& the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start.

the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled.

before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Struggle feels meaningful because it’s an early indicator of acquisition of relevant skills that help acquire resources, allies and mates - this is why evolution made mastery of something a source of dopamine.

But today this link between struggle and expertise is getting uncoupled. For each hand crafted essay, there are a thousand of other AI generated near-indistinguishable replicas that were generated with minimal struggle.

So, why get better at coding, writing, music etc when others can simply prompt their way to a similar quality?

This feeling is a precursor to the meaninglessness crisis that’ll become harder to ignore as AIs become better at literally everything we do.

What to do and why to do are the ultimate questions humanity will have to face.

[Aravind @aravind]

Indeed.

(Read the attached post first, then till the end of this post).

Carl Sagan (Legendary Cosmologist) - "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes birth and death in cycles."

Neils Bohr (Atomic model) - "I go into the Upanishads to ask questions."

Robert Oppenheimer (Father of Atomic bomb) - "Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries."

Erwin Schrodinger (Quantum mechanics) - "Atman = Brahman. The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads."

Nicola Tesla (Legendary inventor) - "All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena."

Fritjof Capra (Particle physicist) - "For the modern physicists, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter."

Albert Einstein - "When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous"

Carl Jung (Analytical psychology) - "Our unconscious definitely prefers the Hindu interpretation of immortality."

Nietzsche (popular philosopher) - "There are so many dawns that have not yet broken" (from the Rig Veda).

Arthur Schopenhauer (pessimistic philosophy) - "In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death."

Then there are so many other legends in science, philosophy, and other fields who were highly influenced and inspired by Indian philosophy, like - Mark Twain, Victor Cousin, Alfred North, Romain Rolland, Rudolf Steine, Humboldt, Voltaire, Huxley, Emerson etc.

But the average Indian ignorant programmed by communists, imperialists, and racists by education, then thinking they are very educated and smart - "The vedas are mythology, Indian scriptures are religious rubbish, there is no use for them, we need to burn the bhagavat gita and eradicate sanatana dharma."

If you are someone still thinking like the above, or asking "what's the use now", first find out for yourself why some of the greatest modern minds read them and swear by them. And they do this even in the age of AI. Ask Sam Altman what he believes is the ultimate truth.