Shubha Hegde

Food Tech @ Amazon | Compulsive list maker, wannabe travel writer, Twitter voyeur, Have wings, Will fly...

[old toons @oldtoons_]

Story time?

Back in the winter of 1955, an Uzbek politician and writer named Sharaf Rashidov went on a diplomatic trip to Jammu and Kashmir.

While he was there, he saw a live performance of "Bombur ta Yambarzal" (The Bumblebee and the Narcissus), a famous 1953 opera by the local poet Dina Nath Nadim.

On stage, characters played literal forces of nature: the spring narcissus, (Yambarzal) and the king of bees (Bombur) represented life and freedom, while winter blizzards symbolised oppression.

Rashidov was so moved by the performance that he went home and turned the story into a 1956 book called "The Kashmir Song", translating the flower's name to its more common regional equivalent, "Nargis".

By 1965, this local Kashmiri tale traveled all the way to Moscow's Soyuzmultfilm studio, that turned it into a gorgeous animated short film called *Nargis*. The animation team crafted the film in the ornate, miniature-painting style characteristic of traditional Russian Palekh lacquer art known for its folkloric elegance. At the same time, the characters’ flowing draped garments, vibrant attire, and decorative jewelry clearly draw inspiration from Indian cultural aesthetics, giving the film an exotic, fairy-tale quality that blends Soviet artistic traditions with the story’s Indian roots.

The film arrived at the perfect time. During the 1950s and 1960s, India and the Soviet Union shared a massive cultural exchange. Hindi cinema was wildly popular across the USSR with films starring actors such as Raj Kapoor drawing large audiences and becoming cultural touchstones. Amid this mutual fascination, Nargis served as a vivid example of how a great story can easily cross borders and connect completely different worlds.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

Heartwarming stuff!

[Rahul Sanghi @RahulSanghi1]

For the last three years, a startup in Bangalore has been obsessed with a pursuit that typically invites raised eyebrows, naked skepticism, and accusations of stealing from sci-fi:

@dognosis is training dogs to detect cancer.

And until you've spent time at their facility - a former pomegranate farm in the outskirts of Bangalore - perhaps skepticism is the rational response.

But Dognosis isn't betting on some pie-in-the-sky idea or some charming novelty act, they're betting on evolution.

@akadogluk and @Itamar_Bitan based their company on the fact that the dog's nose - a product of fifteen millennia of co-evolution with humans - can detect the faint chemical trace of cancer in your breath at a resolution that our machines, algorithms, and laboratory tests have never come close to matching.

We've known this fact for decades. We've consistently failed to do anything meaningful with that knowledge.

The missing link has been figuring out what the dog's nose knows, and applying it in a standardised, scalable, and clinically validated way.

Dognosis is building this missing piece of the equation i.e. the translation layer that allows the dog's nose to speak a language medicine can understand, enabling us to harness an ancient biological intelligence and plug it into our modern medical infrastructure.

Maybe you've read the paragraphs above and retained your skepticism. That's fair. But this past Friday, the Journal of Clinical Oncology - the world's most influential cancer journal - opted to make life much harder for the skeptics.

On Friday, the JCO published Dognosis' landmark study on breath-based multi-cancer detection - the largest of its kind ever conducted - showing that a team of trained dogs, equipped with sensors and AI, could detect multiple cancers from breath alone at 90%+ accuracy - including at Stage I, when it matters most - for $2 a test.

According to Akash, it proved "that everything we’ve known about the dogs is true".

Needless to say, it's a genuine milestone for Indian healthcare, health-tech, deep-tech, and, uh, dog-tech, that deserves far more attention than it's gotten so far.

To help change that, we were lucky to have Akash stop by the Tigerfeathers editorial desk this past week to unpack the Dognosis journey - helping us understand what they're building, how they're doing it, why it matters, and what comes next.

From where we're sitting, Dognosis is an n-of-1 Indian startup with an n-of-1 story that everyone in the Indian tech ecosystem should be aware of. If you've been intrigued by what you've read so far and you're keen to go deeper, dive into our piece here👇

https://t.co/limlGrgxJ1

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@ajit_bhaskar I really miss Permit Room. The baked Mysore Pak was just exemplary and the rest of their food was amazing too. Some of the dishes can still be found on Toit’s menu I believe

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@ajit_bhaskar Treat has reopened on 100ft road!

[Dr Nandita Iyer @saffrontrail]

Hello Twitter fam!
No Gods, No Gurus - A Radical Guide to your Wellbeing
Excited to share my latest book and labour of love, addressing all your burning questions on health and wellbeing with a science-backed, easy to read, practical approach.
Out on Dec 2 | Preorder ⬇️

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@tyags6 Ha ha!! I bought the exact same one last week after thinking about it for years

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@beastoftraal Glad you are ok!!

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

Who are the absolute best performance marketers you know either in SFBA or in India? Need one for a very fast-growing global AI company doubling ARR every few weeks - we'll buy you the latest fully decked macbook of your choice if your reco is hired! RT for karma! 🙏

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@tyags6 Yay! See you soon.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@saffrontrail Can’t wait to see you do amazing things with your clients. All the very best.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@tyags6 Reality is too funny these days.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@Uber_India what am I supposed to do with this dead end of a screen?

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

Mint Lounge team take a bow! Absolute cracker of an edition. All the curated stories are quite singular. Spent a couple of hours today reading the newspaper after ages.

[Mint Lounge @Mint_Lounge]

The Mint Lounge Fiction Special 2025.

Issue out tomorrow

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@GautamGhosh This is the bizzarest thing I have heard in a while

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

Dear D2C brands and new age e-commerce companies, please don’t burn money on advertising and marketing if you are unable to fulfill orders on time or even provide an update to customers for months.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@bigbasket_com it’s been 6 months since I raised this concern. Not only have you failed to resolve this bug in your UX that I am sure is impacting other customers but no attempt even to resolve my problem and get my business.

[bigbasket @bigbasket_com]

@shubha We understand your concern. Hence, we kindly request you to provide us your registered contact details via DM for further assistance.

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@FurlencoSupport I am an UNLMTD customer & have been trying to reach a customer service agent for many days. Every time my call gets disconnected after being on hold for over 10 minutes. Instead of bombarding me with bot calls, please get one of your human agents to call me.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Why did past societies build so much "useless" beauty everywhere — and why did we stop?

It might be a measure of a culture's health... (thread) 🧵

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@tyags6 It is beautiful!

[Shubha Hegde @shubha]

@ajit_bhaskar This happened yesterday night 😂