Ordinary_banda @BandaOrdinary

If you are a surgeon and you are taking your patient's signature on a pre-printed consent form before every operation, then this post is for you. Dr. Ashok T. Bhole, an ophthalmic surgeon, was consulted by Smt. Rajani Prakash Malik for diminished vision in her right eye. After examination, he advised cataract surgery, assuring her that it was a simple, routine procedure with an excellent success rate and that her vision would improve after surgery. What happened after that is very interesting. A thread🧵

संसाधन हो ना हो कला निखर कर सामने आ ही जाती है, एक ❤️ लाइक तो बनता है इस कलाकार के लिए 👍🙏

While celebrity anchors remain busy discussing and distributing “melody,” people in Valsad, Gujarat are battling a severe water crisis. Residents are being forced to climb down wells over 45 feet deep using ropes, just to collect water for daily needs.

Half a century ago, #FIFAWorldCup 1974 treated us to some iconic moments. From Cruyff genius to one of the best free-kick routines ever, here are just seven of them… [🧵 Thread]

Playing the Brazilian way. 😮‍💨 #OTD in 1970, Carlos Alberto put the icing on the cake for @CBF_Futebol's third #FIFAWorldCup title. 🇧🇷

His name was Rajan. He was a final year engineering student at the Regional Engineering College in Calicut, Kerala. His father, T V Eachara Varier, was a Hindi professor at the Government Arts and Science College in the same city. On the morning of March 1 1976 the police came to the college campus and took Rajan away. India was under Emergency. Civil liberties were suspended. Courts had effectively turned away. His father found out the next day from the college principal. He went to every police station in the district. No one admitted to having his son. He met the Home Minister of Kerala, K Karunakaran, directly. He sent petitions to the Home Secretary of the Government of Kerala three times. Not a single reply or acknowledgement came. He wrote to the President of India and the Home Minister of the central government, with copies to every Member of Parliament from Kerala. Nothing. What Eachara Varier did not know at the time was that his son had been taken to an illegal police interrogation camp at Kakkayam. He was tortured. A practice called uruttal was used, where a heavy wooden log is rolled over the body of the victim. Rajan died from his injuries. His body was disposed of by the police and was never found. When the Emergency ended in 1977 Eachara Varier filed a habeas corpus petition in the Kerala High Court. It was the first such petition filed in Kerala after the Emergency. He did it without legal training, without political backing, without money. He had spent everything searching for his son. The court case slowly unravelled the truth. It forced K Karunakaran to resign as Chief Minister of Kerala in 1978 when the adverse judgment came. Rajan’s mother became mentally unstable from the grief. She died in 2000 still not knowing where her son was. Eachara Varier wrote his memoir, Memories of a Father, which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004. In its final lines he wrote, “I don’t close the door. Let the rain lash inside and drench me. Let at least my invisible son know that his father never shut the door.” He died on April 13 2006. He never found his son’s body. Rajan was picked up from his college campus on a March morning in 1976. He was never seen again. Repost this. Some stories must not be allowed to disappear.

On Raghu Rai: of his many unforgettable frames, I keep returning to Age and Innocence - that 1982 Baroda photo essay where a blind Muslim beggar and a mentally challenged Hindu girl share a beautifulf, wordless companionship. This is Rai at his most tender- and devastating. 1/4

The saddest thing I have seen on the Internet today

Let's talk about the American soldiers for a moment, because this point is always avoided. They weren't all demons. Most were nineteen years old. Most were poor. Most were drafted, meaning they had no choice. The military took working-class kids, Black kids, Latino kids, kids from rural towns who had never left their counties, and sent them to the other side of the world to fight a war their government lied to them about. And still, Vietnam defeated them. Not because Vietnamese fighters were superhuman. But because they were fighting for something real. Their land. Their families. Their right to exist without foreign soldiers on their soil. The Americans were fighting for an abstraction sold to them by politicians who kept their own children safely in universities through draft deferments. Dick Cheney had five deferments. Joe Biden had five deferments. Donald Trump had five deferments. The men who sent the poor to die had made very sure their own sons would not be among them. This is why they lost. Not because of hippies. Not because of media coverage. Not because of political constraints. Because you cannot sustain a war where the powerful send the powerless to die for reasons even the powerful don't fully believe. Vietnamese fighters knew exactly why they were in those tunnels. The American soldiers, many of them, didn't know why they were in that jungle. That asymmetry of purpose is more decisive than any asymmetry of weapons. And when those soldiers came home, broken, traumatized, addicted, America discarded them. The same government that sent them offered them nothing. They slept on streets. They died by suicide in numbers that exceeded combat deaths. America didn't just lose to Vietnam on the battlefield. It lost to Vietnam and then destroyed its own army afterward. That is not a superpower functioning as advertised.

Marcus Aurelius on complaint: "Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight." Seneca: "A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials." Epictetus: "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." The Stoics were not, to be clear, against acknowledging difficulty. They were not repression advocates. They were not telling you to smile through pain. They were pointing out that complaint, particularly the abstract, generalised, habitual complaint about circumstances beyond your control, does not change the circumstances. It changes you. It makes you worse at dealing with the circumstances. It trains the nervous system to treat hardship as catastrophe. It keeps the wound open. Doris walked into the bog four times. She extracted herself four times. Each time: assessed the bog, concluded the bog started it, returned to grazing. No ongoing narrative about the bog. No identity built around having been a sheep that went in the bog. No story she tells other sheep. Just: went in the bog. Came out. Moved on. The bog is the bog's problem. The bog did not define Doris. Most of the things you think are defining you aren't. They're just bogs. Come out of them and graze.

We laughed when miracle cures were launched with straight faces. From Coronil to bhabhi ji Papad. Because surely that was the limit of absurdity. It felt embarrassing, but we survived. Then came the cough syrups that killed children, and the laughter stopped. That had to be rock bottom, we told ourselves. How much lower could incompetence sink? Apparently lower. People began dying after drinking ordinary govt. supplied tap water. Not from some exotic toxin smuggled across borders, not from a rare disease, but from tap water. And even then, the country did not erupt, it adjusted. The benchmark of outrage shifted further down. Now we happily consume chemical-laced, dung enriched spices, diluted and fake milk, synthetic ghee, counterfeit paneer, expired sweets specially stocked for festivals, fake medicines in real-looking packs, vegetables plumped with injections and polished by carcinogenic creams, chickens fattened on deadly overdose of antibiotics, eggs engineered for quantity, fries and burgers soaked in oil the colour of diesel. We know. We joke about it. We forward messages about it. And then we eat. The tragedy is not just the contamination. Each criminal scandal lowers the bar a little more. We measure relief by the absence of immediate death. At least we didn’t die drinking tap water, we tell ourselves. Criminal incompetence spreads like thick slow poison. You wake up one day and realize you’re standing at the bottom of a bottom-less pit.

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild. 5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals. The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today. The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century. People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable. 60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

Yunie ૮ ․ ․ ྀིა @ppleinthedark

8 months ago

I googled why one hour is 60 minutes and one minute is 60 seconds and the answer wasn’t even that exciting

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Right in the middle of nowhere, Prague has a street delightfully named after Rabindranath Thakur. Thákurova Street. And that is not an accident. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian poet and Nobel laureate, held a special place in Czech cultural life in the early 20th century. His humanistic, lyrical poetry and message of optimism and freedom resonated strongly with Czech writers, artists and intellectuals during the formation of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic after World War I. Tagore visited Prague twice in the 1920s (1921 and 1928), giving public lectures and seeing his plays staged in major theatres. These events brought his work directly into Czech public life. Czech composers were inspired by Tagore’s voice and poetry. Most famously, Leoš Janáček attended one of Tagore’s lectures and later set his text to music in the choral composition The Wandering Madman. Tagore was widely seen in Czechoslovakia as an emissary of peace and international understanding, especially in the face of rising fascism in Europe. He publicly condemned Nazism and expressed solidarity with Czechoslovakia after the Munich Crisis in 1938. His name lives on in Prague’s Thákurova Street (named for him), a bust in the city commemorates his connection, and his works remain part of Czech cultural memory.

West Bengal’s prized delicacy, nolen gur, is a fragrant jaggery made from the sap of the date palm tree, during late autumn and winter. It’s an important seasonal occupation and draws migrants from other districts

The 'knight’s tour' is a sequence of a knight's moves on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once.

The Motherland Calls is a monumental statue located in Volgograd, Russia, built to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad. Including the sword, it stands 85 meters tall and is the tallest female statue in the world. The statue symbolizes the resistance against Nazi Germany and the victory achieved at Stalingrad, one of the most critical turning points of the Second World War. The female figure holding a sword represents the sacrifice, determination, and the call to defend the homeland by the Soviet people. Completed in 1967, the monument is regarded as one of the most powerful symbols of Soviet monumental art and holds a special place in the historical memory of the struggle against fascism.

Trads ke Maseeha Sai Deepak ka ek purana video on reservation. 🍿

A more precise statement: All modern humans have an unbroken lineage of about 300,000 years going back to Africa. All Indians carry a genetic lineage going back about 60,000 years to the arrival of the Out of Africa migrants. All Indians also carry the genetic lineage of the people who would go on to build the Harappan Civilization, a mix of the Out of Africa migrants and later migrants from ancient Iran, going back to perhaps 7,000 years ago. Most Indian population groups also carry the genetic lineage of the Steppe migrations from Central Asia between 2000-1500 BCE that brought Indo-European languages to the subcontinent, as also the East Asian migrations that brought Austro-Asiatic languages after 2000 BCE. Yes, we do carry a long genetic lineage, one that goes far beyond 5000 years, as we are a mix of multiple migrations into India that happened in prehistory.

Kashmiri Hindu @BattaKashmiri

9 months ago

If you are born a Hindu, you have a unbroken lineage of 5000+ years. Be Proud 🔥

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Most debates about Hindi cinema miss the point. The danger isn’t that films incite violence. It’s that they prepare us emotionally for it — while letting us believe we’re still reasonable people 1/12