mahesh p

लहर के आगे छोटे तिनके की क्या औकात?

[Out Of Context Erling Haaland @ErlingNoContext]

🗣️ Erling Haaland: “I try to relax as much as I can. Being on a farm... driving a tractor, feeding my cows, that’s my dream.” 🤠

🗣️ “That’s what I want to do when I retire. I think I will buy a small farm when I finish football.” 🐐

[brett goldstein @thatguybg]

https://t.co/AvBeoEzr02

[Uday Kotak @udaykotak]

Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.
Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.
It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe.
Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[mahesh p @transrails]

@CricCrazyJohns He should be relieved by LSG, not just his captaincy, accountability starts from the top

[mahesh p @transrails]

@ESPNcricinfo Every one has a "made for each other" person, this was just its moment

[mahesh p @transrails]

Sridhar Vembu on IIT classmate, IAS officer with 32 transfers in 34 years: ‘He chose to stay in India'

https://t.co/yhYweymAVU

[Sann @san_x_m]

His name is Ashok Khemka.

IIT Kharagpur. PhD from TIFR. IAS 1991 batch.

In 2012 he was Director General of Land Consolidation in Haryana.

He found a land deal where Robert Vadra’s company bought 3.5 acres in Gurugram for Rs 7.5 crore and sold it to DLF for Rs 58 crore within weeks.

700 percent profit. No physical development. Fraudulent mutation approvals.

He cancelled the deal and declared it illegal.

Within 10 days he was transferred.

That was transfer number 1 of 57.

57 transfers in 34 years. One every 6 months.

Every time he exposed corruption in a new department he was moved to a less significant one.

Archives. Archaeology. Printing and Stationery.

His batchmates became Secretaries to the Government of India.

He was sent to manage old records.

He posted on X after his 53rd transfer.

The reward for honesty is humiliation.

He retired in April 2025 as Additional Chief Secretary.

He never became Chief Secretary.

No medal. No recognition.

Just 57 punishments for doing his job.

[Chennai Super Kings @ChennaiIPL]

Official Statement

MS Dhoni is currently undergoing rehabilitation for a calf strain. As a result, he is likely to miss the first two weeks of TATA IPL 2026.

Get well soon, Thala! 💛🦁

[mahesh p @transrails]

@ChennaiIPL WOW!, this time csk's wooden spoon defence in tatters @ChennaiIPL @IPL @msdhoni @godthanyou

[mahesh p @transrails]

@ChennaiIPL WOW!, this time csk's wooden spoon defence in tatters

[Hindustan Times @htTweets]

Nearly two years before Ranya Rao was arrested by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) at the Bengaluru airport for smuggling gold, the Kannada actor and her associate were cheated of ₹2 crore by a Ugandan gold agent, officials have revealed.

In a chargesheet filed last month, ED officials said Rao and her associates smuggled 127.28 kg of gold valued at ₹102.55 crore into India between March 2024 and March 2025. The gold was later sold in the domestic market through a network of handlers and jewellers.

More details 🔗 https://t.co/e8IZptKw5a

[mahesh p @transrails]

@EconomicTimes this is a crazy ride on a roller coaster, that only goes up #goldprice

[mahesh p @transrails]

https://t.co/khWPnPT19I

[mmk666 @mmk6664]

Do not fly IndiGo. Passengers are being left stranded for hours — even overnight — with zero information or support. The airline’s disregard for people is unacceptable, and it’s shameful that they face no accountability. @MoCA_GoI @DGCAIndia @IndiGo6E

#indigo #mumbai #airport

[Chris Brunet @chrisbrunet]

UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen. From page 49 of the university’s own report:

• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn't subtract fractions

UCSD is ranked as the nation's 5th best public university. Universities are cooked.

[mahesh p @transrails]

@madhavsharma @ShubmanGill Just walking up and down to the pitch is not enough captain saar, @ShubmanGill , dimaag our stature ko alag kijiye

[mahesh p @transrails]

https://t.co/GnPKAfotkb , .......

[ANI @ANI]

Bengaluru: On former BPCL CFO Sivakumar K's allegations that bribes were demanded at every step after his daughter's death, Karnataka Home Minister G. Parmeshwara says, "We will take strict action against anyone who takes money, whether in the police department or any other government department. If we discover that the police department has done so, we will take strict action against them. If it is true that they took money, we will dismiss them from their jobs... We will definitely take strict action. The Chief Minister has said it, I have said it. We will not encourage it."

[mahesh p @transrails]

Real inflammability, demonstrated, no toxic flames too, science saves

[Weather Monitor @WeatherMonitors]

Today, an Air China flight (CA139) from Hangzhou to Incheon was forced to make an emergency landing in Shanghai, China, after a lithium battery in a passenger’s overhead bag caught fire.