Surya A. Moitra

here to bReak fRee,to rEdiscover mYself and perhaps to be 'coMforTably nUmB'..in parallel life- trying to make the world better with AI/ML

[Nitin Sharma @nitinsharma1]

Finally visited the @SciGalleryBlr today. What a labour of love, set up by my friend Dr. @JahnaviPhalkey.

If you are in Bangalore, check out the new Quantum exhibition - regardless of whether you are into #quantum physics or not.

They’ve brought together science, art and philosophy in a beautiful way.

I think as you go through life, principles of quantum make more and more sense to try understand all forms of perceived reality.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

That building is not a design failure.

Let me explain the science behind this, because hanging clothes outside is not a habit we should be embarrassed about.

It is genuinely the smarter method.

Let's begin with what the sun actually does to wet cloth.

Sunlight carries ultraviolet rays. UV damages the DNA of bacteria and germs sitting in fabric.

UV light is used to disinfect hospital equipment and drinking water. Putting towels and bedsheets in full sun is disinfection.

Second, the sun is a mild bleach. Sunlight slowly breaks down the compounds that cause stains and yellowing.

That is why whites dried outside stay white. A dryer cannot do this. It only has heat.

Third, that fresh smell of sun-dried clothes is actually chemistry. When sunlight hits wet fabric, it triggers reactions that produce the same kinds of aroma compounds found in flowers and grass.

Scientists have actually studied this. Infact, driers try to fake this exact same smell.

Finally, dryers destroy clothes. All the lint we need to clean from the dryer filter time to time is our clothes, torn off thread by thread, cycle after cycle.

Line-dried clothes simply last longer.

Now let's add Indian conditions to this.

We get sunshine close to 300 days a year across most of the country. A shirt hung at 9 am is ready by lunch.

Running a machine for an hour to do a job the sky does for free, in a country where every unit of electricity matters to the household budget, would be incredibly stupid.

Now the more interesting question. Why does the West not do this?

See, in Northern Europe, Canada, and the northern US, it is cold, wet or dark for a big part of the year. A shirt hung outside in a London November will still be damp two days later, and clothes drying slowly indoors invite mould.

The dryer there is not a luxury. It solves a big problem for several months a year.

But climate is only half the story, because plenty of the American South and West is as sunny as India.

The other half is history and status, and this part is fascinating.

Dryers spread through America after World War 2, pushed by campaigns like "Live Better Electrically" in the 1950s, which sold electric appliances as the symbol of the modern home.

The message underneath was simple. Machines are progress. The clothesline is what poor people use.

That message worked so well that it eventually became law.

Around 60 million Americans live under Homeowners Associations, which are basically society committees with legal power.

By one estimate, more than half of them restrict or ban clotheslines. Ban. As in, hang a bedsheet in your own backyard, which you bought with your own money, and the association can fine you.

One woman in Oregon was fined nearly $1,000 for sun-drying her laundry.

Why? Appearance and property prices.

Visible laundry is read as a sign of poverty, and neighbours fear it drags home values down.

The results are exactly what you would expect. About 85% of American homes own a dryer. Dryers eat roughly 6% of all residential electricity there, about $9 billion in energy bills every year.

They also cause more than 12,000 house fires annually. Yeah, dryers burn down houses.

Now the best part of this story is that America is slowly walking it back.

There is an actual movement in the US called Right to Dry. States like Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have passed laws making clothesline bans void, and over a dozen more protect line drying under solar energy laws.

Skipping the dryer can cut a home's carbon footprint by about 2,400 pounds a year, so environmentalists there are fighting, state by state, for the legal right to do what every Indian balcony everyday. :)

Fundamentally, UV disinfection, free solar energy, zero carbon, clothes that last longer and smell better.

The towels are exactly where they should be. :)

[Surya A. Moitra @surya19m]

@sudiprokaya Sometimes persistence is not working harder forever. Sometimes it is simply refusing to let your worst moment make the final decision. ---- wow!

[Sudip @sudiprokaya]

I was born in Simikot, a remote Himalayan town in Nepal.
As a child, I moved across the country, leaving my family behind to attend a residential school on a scholarship.

Until high school, I had almost no access to the internet. I had never met anyone working in tech. I did not even know that building a startup was a possible career.

Grade 11: My biggest ambition was to get into a good engineering college in Nepal and study civil engineering.

Grade 12: After preparing for 1.5 years, I ranked first in the national Olympiad and earned the highest score among the Nepali participants at the International Olympiad in Poland.

January 2024: I started my college applications late and spent weeks pulling all-nighters trying to finish them.

January 2024: On the night of the MIT deadline, I almost gave up. I still had several essays unfinished and such a bad headache that I went to sleep believing the application was over.

A few hours later: My friends kept calling until I woke up. We finished the essays together.

I submitted my MIT application with 23 seconds left.

March 2024: I got into MIT.

Fall 2024: I arrived at MIT and felt behind classmates who had been coding and building things since childhood.

2025: I became obsessed with text-to-video, especially videos that could teach. I believed that could open up an entirely new way for people to learn, so I dove into building them.

December, 2025 – Jan, 2026: I slept inside MIT’s entrepreneurship center and innovation headquarters (IHQ) for nearly 40 nights while building Lamina Labs through the winter break.

Numbers were impressive.

February 19, 2026: @laminalabs became the first Nepali founding team ever accepted into @ycombinator

February 2026: I left MIT to build Lamina Labs full-time.

2026: We moved to San Francisco and raised $4.8 million to build Lamina Labs.

The point is not that persistence guarantees success.
It does not.
But nearly every major change in my life came after a moment when giving up felt completely reasonable.

Sometimes persistence is not working harder forever.
Sometimes it is simply refusing to let your worst moment make the final decision.
This has been the defining lesson of my life.

P.S. We are building Lamina Labs, the fastest video infrastructure for LLMs. Our first product, Simi, lets you generate explainer videos from a single prompt or documents in under a minute.

[Sami @sfakkawi]

We raised our seed round in 5 days with an 80th percentile valuation (as first-time founders).

When raising, a good data room will make you look 100X more legit than every other seed stage startup. Most companies don't even have this figured out at Series A, here's what to include:

1/ Customer_Cube_0226: Customers tab with each customer's industry, region, size, sales owner, etc. Contracts tab with each contracts start date, term, realized rev, projected rev, status, and any special notes. Revenue schedule / Gantt chart tabes with revenue recognition and contracted revenue over time. Summary / settings tabs. We made ours in google sheets with Claude!

2/ PL_Memo_0226: Your memo serves a different purpose than your deck. It's job is to tell a story and sell a vision. The sections we included: Who we are, our niche and bet, market / competition, execution, and team. Ours was 1 page.

3/ PL_Deck_0226: Team, product differentiation, comp landscape, traction, win rate / pipeline, case studies. Invest in design!!!

4/ Operating_Model: This one is usually the hardest for early stage companies. But, great if you are able to show operating margins. It communicates a certain seriousness if you understand your costs and investments, and are thoughtful about how you project them to grow. This helps answer the question "Why do you need $5M instead of $2M"

5/ Pipeline_ALL: Include: closed won, closed lost, and all other pipeline stages. How the customer found you, projected deal value, etc. (historic included)

[Luís Figo @LuisFigo]

Today I join others from across our game and call for Gianni Infantino to resign as FIFA President.

Infantino has debased the office that he promised to elevate. He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game he is supposed to serve. 

He has lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisers, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport and even, it would seem, the FIFA Peace Prize winner. 

It is too late to save his dignity but it is not too late to save football. He should go. Now.

#Infantinout

https://t.co/j93k5MnlK2

[Shilpa @shilpa_cn]

Karnataka: Daughter of the KPSC Chairman got selected after declaring family’s annual income as ₹40K while her father, the Chairman himself, earns ₹2.17 L a month!

Justice Nagaprasanna tears apart the defence’s arguments!

One of the finest judges Karnataka has ever had! 🔥

[Srikanth Matrubai @SrikantMatrubai]

BEFORE SLEEPING, KNOW THIS...
Every morning, before Bengaluru wakes up, BMTC driver Krishnamurthy, after reporting for duty at Depot-33, he carries around 10 freshly packed breakfast packets on his bus. As he drives from Uttarahalli to Majestic, he looks beyond bus stops and passengers, searching for homeless people, elderly destitute individuals, and anyone who may have slept hungry. Before his first trip ends, every packet has reached someone in need.
The money doesn't come from an NGO or a fundraiser. It comes from Krishnamurthy's own salary. He says he doesn't do it for recognition. He is doing since Covid

[Pawan Chandana @PawanKChandana]

Wanted to take a moment to thank someone who gave @SkyrootA its first real lift-off—Mukesh Bansal.

8 Years ago, we sent him a cold LinkedIn message.

He replied.

We met that very weekend.

Soon after, he became Skyroot’s first investor with a ₹10 crore cheque.

At the time, there was no space policy. No proof that we could build an orbital rocket. Immense technology risk. And every reason to say no.

Yet he looked beyond the uncertainty. He believed in our passion and saw possibility long before there was evidence.

But what stayed with me even more than the investment was the trust.

He gave us complete freedom to build, trusted us to make the right decisions, and was always there to mentor us whenever we needed him. More than capital, he helped shape our thinking with one piece of advice:

“Always do the right thing. This journey will be much longer and much harder than you imagine. Build two things with equal importance: the product and the organisation.”

This has guided us through every phase of the journey and continue to shape how we build Skyroot today.

The first cheque is never just capital. It is belief.

Every great startup needs someone willing to take that first leap of faith—when all they can really invest in is the founders’ conviction.

India needs many more such risk-takers backing ambitious deep-tech entrepreneurs long before success becomes obvious.

Thank you, Mukesh. 🙏

@mukeshbansal06

P.S. This picture was taken during one of Mukesh’s visits to our factory in Skyroot’s early days. We were showing him just how light Vikram-S’s carbon composite structures were—a small moment from a journey that has since come a long way. 🚀

[Mohandas Pai @TVMohandasPai]

PM @narendramodi Sir This is a major source of grievance by students. A GC with 90%+ does not get a seat but some others in categories with very low marks get in! This is very wrong a 10% lower marks is ok but not so low. This is creating huge anger amongst students who work very hard for years to qualify. Needs a solution.

[ُ @Asensii20]

He wasn’t lying because what the hell is this???

[Harshdeep Rapal @harshdeeprapal]

Hearing out Gen Z.

My father's caretaker is a 24 year old guy. Hails from Kanpur. He has done BSc Nursing and we have hired him through an agency that provides elder-care professionals at home.

Spends 12 hours at our home (8 am to 8 pm), rarely takes a leave. A very diligent guy, soft-spoken, well-read (keeps reading books from my collection) and speaks pretty fluent English.

On the morning of 20th July, he calls up and says he is not feeling well. On 21st he came, was limping a bit. Did not share what happened.

Yesterday he shared with dad that he told a lie. On 20th he had gone to Jantar-Mantar for supporting the students' protest and was hit by the police truncheon during lathi-charge. While running, lost his shoe and twisted his ankle.

Last night when I went home and was having dinner, dad told me about this. Today morning when he came I talked to him and realized what 'generation(al) gap' means.

While talking to him I realized, he was 9-10 when Anna Andolan happened. He was 10-11 when Arvind Kejriwal became the CM for the first time. He was 11-12 when BJP formed the government in 2014. The NEET aspirants are even younger than him. They were toddlers 12 years ago.

Some of the things we have lived through, are alien to him. All he has seen since he started experiencing the world is the current government and Modi as the PM. So for him, everything that he and his generation is been through in last 7-8 years since he 'grew up' - the responsibility lies with the current government.

He mentioned that there are 1000s of youngsters who have travelled from as far as Lucknow and Varanasi for these protests.

Again on being asked why? Why did he and his friends join the protest? Why these students have come so far to join the protests?

NEET exam leak was the last thing on his mind. The reasons he gave were - everything becoming expensive and unaffordable, no job opportunities, government's and police's high-headedness, corruption everywhere - and then went on to mention falling bridges, broken roads, no footpaths, stray dogs and cattle all around and dumps of garbage everywhere. He called ethanol-blending a scam.

I felt he was just waiting to burst out everything that's piled up in his mind. Glad that heard him out.

Then I realized that there are millions like him and these protests are not just about the NEET exam leak. These are the piled up frustrations finding a way out.

[Pratik S Patil @Liberal_India1]

मी गेल्या बारा वर्षांपासून भारतीय जनता पक्षाचा कार्यकर्ता म्हणून काम करतो आहे. पक्षाने दिलेले अनेक आदेश मी डोळे झाकून पाळत आलेलो आहे. आमच्या अहिल्यानगर जिल्ह्यात अनेक सामाजिक कार्यक्रम मी पक्षाच्या बॅनरखाली घेतले आहेत. स्वतःच्या खिशातले पैसे खर्चून मी पक्षासाठी स्वत्व अर्पण केलं आहे. आपण चौकशी करू शकता. एवढी वर्षे एकाही निवडणूकीसाठी तिकिट मिळण्याची मी अपेक्षा ठेवली नाही. सतत अविरतपणे मी पक्षासाठी झोकून दिलं.

माझा पुतण्या सुदर्शन घोरपडे ह्यावर्षी बारावीला होता. नीट पेपर फुटल्यानंतर त्याने खचून न जाता पुन्हा पेपर देण्याचा निर्णय घेतला. त्याची मोठी बहीण देवयानी घोरपडे दिल्लीत एमबीबीएस डिग्रीच्या शेवटच्या वर्षाला आहे. तिचा आदर्श सुदर्शनसमोर होता. नीटची दुसऱ्यांदा घेतलेली परीक्षा सुदर्शनला नीट देता नाही. परीक्षा झाल्यानंतर मात्र तो एकटाएकटा राहू लागला. अर्थात त्याच्या आईवडिलांनी त्याला चांगलं सांभाळून घेतलं. पण पेपरफुटीचा त्याच्या मनावर परिणाम झाला. आता पुण्यातील चांगल्या मानसोपचारतज्ज्ञाकडून तो उपचार घेत आहे. ह्या सगळ्याचा फॅमिलीवर परिणाम झाला. कुटुंबाचंच मानसिक स्वास्थ्य ढासळलं.

सांगण्याचा मुद्दा हा, काल झालेल्या आंदोलनात सुदर्शनची बहीण देवयानी उपस्थित होती. तिच्या दोन मैत्रिणींसोबत वैद्यकीय प्रथमोपचारपेटी सोबत घेऊन ती आंदोलनस्थळी गेली होती. पोलिसांनी लाठीचार्ज केल्यानंतर तिच्या डॉक्टर मैत्रिणीच्या खांद्यावर जबर मार बसला आहे. स्वतः देवयानीचा पूर्ण चेहरा सुजला आहे. अश्रूधुराची नळकांडी अगदी जवळ फुटल्यामुळे. तिला डाव्या डोळ्यात इन्फेक्शन होऊन दिसणं बंद झालं आहे. ही बातमी कळताच आम्ही दिल्लीकडे धाव घेतली. पण हे सुदर्शनला कळू दिलं नाही. त्याला नातेवाईकांकडे सुखरूप ठेवलं आहे. त्याला सोशल मीडिया, मोबाईल व टीव्हीपासून दूर ठेवलं आहे.

माझ्या पक्षाने 2014 साली प्रॉमिस केलेला भारत हा नव्हता. मी काय तोंड घेऊन माझ्या पुतण्यापुतणीसमोर जाऊ शकतो? भाजपचा शहरप्रमुख स्वतःला अभिमानाने म्हणवून घेतो, पण माझ्या पुढच्या पिढीला मी काय भविष्य देत आहे. मन व्यथित झालं आहे.

माझ्या सद्सद्विवेकबुद्धीवर विश्वास ठेवत मी भारतीय जनता पक्षाच्या सर्व पदांचा आणि प्राथमिक सदस्यत्वाचा राजीनामा देत आहे.

ऍड. गोविंद बाळासाहेब घोरपडे
राहुरी, अहिल्यानगर.

[St. Broseph @St_Brosephs]

Sir, the parents of Aditya Prabhu, a Bengaluru student who died by suicide in 2023 after his own professors told him to kill himself, called your office EVERY SINGLE DAY for SIX MONTHS just to get an appointment to expose the college's misconduct.

You didn't give them those five minutes. Their cries went unheard. I have witnessed years of agony that they've lived through since then.

Because of your apathy, three more students died by suicide at the same "University" that year. The chargesheeted accused still show up to that campus every morning and teach. You did nothing. You are still doing nothing.

This rage was not built in a day. It was built by your silence while children were dying. This has nothing to do with any political party, so please don't make it about politics.

Do the right thing for once and pave the way for someone who is more competent and is actually interested in running the Education Ministry properly.

It's the only thing anyone wants from you anymore 🙏

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

One of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen from a supposed sportsman. Messi’s fake halo shattered in this World Cup; he was the sneaky cheating leader of a vile bunch of violent thugs.

[Aadya Kanchan @Aadyakanchan09]

At 13, Bengaluru's water crisis sparked my curiosity and set me on a mission to make every drop count. What began as a simple question -
Why do we continue to waste water even when we know it's running out? - Grew into three years of research, countless prototypes, and one belief:

Big change begins with small actions.
This led to development of NIRI, a patented IoT-enabled smart water conservation system that helps reduce water wastage through real-time leak blockage, behaviour-based nudges, and automatic flow regulation.
NIRI isn't just a smart water device, it's an attempt to make water conservation an everyday behaviour rather than an occasional choice. The technology has been piloted in homes, schools, hospitals, and educational institutions.

I'm looking to collaborate with schools, communities, companies, policymakers, and fellow innovators who believe technology can help build a more water-secure future.

Every drop counts. Every action matters. Let's build the future of water together.
#waterconservation#NIRI#ClimateTech##WaterSecurity #IoT #EveryDropCounts

[Jose de Jesus Ortiz @OrtizKicks]

👀
Argentina was an “utter disgrace,” according to these ESPN analysts, who pointed out what they called Argentina’s “thuggery.”

[Managing Madrid @managingmadrid]

King.

[🎩 Andy’s Football Tips @AndyRobsonTips]

Embarrassing this from Messi.

[Toni Kroos @ToniKroos]

Football won