Anuja Darekar @Neurocorn

BJP upping its SM game finally! And what a way to do it!! Enjoying the SM blitzkreig!

BJP @BJP4India

2 months ago

सवाल उठाने वालों, जरा ये तस्वीर देख लो! 🇮🇳 Make in India से शुरू हुआ सफर आज Made in India को दुनिया की पहचान बना रहा है। और ये तो सिर्फ ट्रेलर है... आत्मनिर्भर भारत से विकसित भारत तक, 2047 का लक्ष्य भी तय है। नया भारत बन रहा है… तेज़ी से, और अब रुकने वाला नहीं है! 📈

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Ayurveda has always claimed that people are born into 1 of 3 broad constitutional types: Vata, Pitta, Kapha...that shape everything from metabolism to disease vulnerability to how a person responds to a given medicine. For most of modern medical history, this has been treated as pre-scientific folk classification, roughly on par with astrology, with no expectation that it would map onto anything measurable in the body. In 2008, a team at India's own CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, led by Bhavana Prasher and Mitali Mukerji, published a study in the Journal of Translational Medicine, a serious government genetics lab, not an Ayurveda advocacy group. They screened ~850 volunteers down to a much smaller group of healthy individuals who fit cleanly into 1 of the 3 extreme Prakriti types using a validated Ayurvedic classification process, then compared their gene expression patterns (which genes were switched more on / off, not their raw DNA sequence) along with blood chemistry and hematology. They were not trying to prove Ayurveda right; they were checking whether a genuine biological signal existed underneath an old classification system.... It did: distinct patterns of gene activity, blood chemistry, and a specific oxygen-sensing gene called EGLN1 that behaved differently between Pitta and Kapha individuals. That gene turned out to be worth chasing..... In 2010, a follow-up study by an overlapping team, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), dug specifically into EGLN1 and found actual genetic variants of the gene that differed in frequency between Pitta and Kapha individuals, variants independently known to be involved in high-altitude adaptation and resistance to high-altitude pulmonary edema. A gene flagged by nothing more than an ancient constitutional-typing system turned out to sit inside a pathway actively used by human populations adapting to low-oxygen environments. Then came the harder test..... In 2015, a larger follow-up study, published in Scientific Reports, a Nature-family journal, involving a wider Indian Ayurgenomics research network went a level deeper and screened the actual DNA rather than gene activity. They ran a full genome-wide SNP scan (Affymetrix 6.0 chip, roughly a million markers) on 262 healthy men, narrowed down from an initial pool of 3,416 volunteers, all independently classified into extreme Vata /Pitta / Kapha types by both senior Ayurvedic physicians and a separate validated software tool, with only the cases where the 2 methods agreed included in the final analysis. They found 52 SNPs.... Actual sequence-level genetic markers that reliably distinguished the 3 Prakriti groups from each other, 1 of them near a gene called PGM1, tied to metabolic traits classically associated with Pitta. The result held up even after being cross-checked against a separate population of 297 people with different ancestries, which should have scrambled any real signal if the categories were meaningless. Another 2011 study led by Ghodke and colleagues found that genetic variants for the drug-metabolizing gene CYP2C19 were also skewed across Prakriti types, fast-metabolizer variants enriched in Pitta, slow-metabolizer variants enriched in Kapha lining up, unnervingly well, with the classical description of Pitta as quick-burning and Kapha as slow. What it does show, cautiously and specifically, is that a 3,000 year old system of sorting people into constitutional types built entirely on external observation, with zero access to DNA managed to carve the human population along a line that, when a modern lab went looking with a completely different tool, turned out to correspond to something real in the genome. That is not nothing. That is a testable hypothesis from antiquity that survived contact with a genome sequencer. 🙏🙏

Can you guess what "112" refers to here? It is not the number of new AIIMS hospitals / a GDP growth ranking / a census category. 112 is how many of India's most broken districts the govt picked out in 2018 and then did something almost nobody does in governance: put them on a live, public scoreboard. Updated every month. Ranked against each other. For everyone to see including the district's own citizens. Here is the twist that makes it genius: they did not rank districts on who is best. They ranked them on who is improving fastest, called the "Delta Ranking." So a district stuck at rock bottom for 70 years is racing against its own last month. A last-place district can top the monthly leaderboard just by moving faster than everyone else. That single design choice turned Indian bureaucracy into something it almost never is: competitive. In the 2022-23 Union Budget, the Finance Minister told Parliament that 95% of these 112 districts had surpassed their own state's average on health, nutrition, financial inclusion, and basic infrastructure. What actually moved: - Ranchi built a live app tracking hospital bed occupancy and malnutrition treatment in real time. NITI Aayog has showcased it as a flagship example of what real time data can do for a district's health system. - Baramulla, a district in Jammu & Kashmir rocketed from rank 108 to rank 35 out of 112, hitting full saturation on child immunization and maternal nutrition support. - Nuh, Haryana, once written off as one of India's worst districts, jumped from 30th to 2nd nationally in a single ranking cycle. - Babies born in a real medical facility instead of at home rose meaningfully, alongside a 3.6-4.2% jump in child immunization against BCG and polio and an 11% rise in infants exclusively breastfed for their first six months. These 112 districts hold ~21% of India's population, 1 in 5 Indians. That is more people than most countries have, living in the places India was most likely to quietly leave behind. But, just a boring sounding dashboard, that has been the difference, month after month, district after district, between a baby born on a mud floor and a baby born under a nurse's watch. Bharat is rising. 🙏🙏 Dashboard link is in the comments, if you want to check it yourself.

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That little 'thank you' at the end! Awww! ❤️❤️

Rupok Acharjee @RupokAcharjee

2 months ago

Video of the Day 🥹🥹

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@ksinamdar @ananthmahadevan Oh this is awesome! Waiting eagerly for what's to come!

For centuries, Leprosy (Hansen's Disease) was treated as an incurable curse. Even after antibiotics were introduced, treatment required yrs of heavy drug regimens & nerve damage often persisted. In the late 1970s, an Indian biochemist developed the world's very 1st immunotherapeutic vaccine for leprosy, using a harmless, non-pathogenic soil bacterium to awaken the human immune system. While global pharma labs focused exclusively on developing chemical antibiotics to kill Mycobacterium leprae, . Dr. Gursaran Pran (G.P.) Talwar at the National Institute of Immunology (which he founded) in New Delhi realized that the real problem was immune paralysis. In severe lepromatous leprosy, the patient's T-cells completely fail to recognize the pathogen. Talwar screened dozens of soil mycobacteria & identified a specific, non-pathogenic strain named Mycobacterium w (Mw, now classified as Mycobacterium indicus pranii). He discovered that when killed Mw bacteria were injected into leprosy patients alongside standard multi-drug therapy (MDT): - It re-energized the patient's dormant cell-mediated immunity. - It accelerated bacterial clearance from the skin & nerves by up to 50%. - It significantly reduced the incidence of debilitating painful immune flare-ups (erythema nodosum leprosum). The Mw vaccine became the world's 1st scientifically proven immunotherapeutic agent for leprosy, later found to also boost host immunity against drug-resistant tuberculosis & certain types of tumors. Global health agencies spent decades searching for complex synthetic molecules, an Indian biochemist looked into the dirt under our feet and found a harmless soil microbe that taught the human immune system how to conquer 1 of the oldest afflictions in human history.

BJP State Secretary @asuvathaman addressed the UNHRC in Geneva. He called for an end to forced religious conversions and said Hinduism is an ancient civilization, not just a religion. He also linked the protection of ancient cultures with the global climate conversation.

Everyone who lived in 1990s knows how Misa Bharti, daughter of convicted criminal Lalu Yadav became a MBBS. Seats were created for her, transfer into govt college was done overnight. Then when her MBBS subject exams were held, examiners were threatened to make her a topper. Famously one of her examiner had said “I don’t have a choice but to top you as I want to live to see some more monsoon seasons and eat Bhutta but I have only one request, don’t ever practice medicine” Yeh aajkal fair exams par morcha kar rahi hai. Samajwadi party too. They had overruled anti copying law brought in by CM Kalyan Singh who lost his CM seat because he wanted fair exams and Mulayam famously overturned it allowing open copying which made every UP graduate literally unemployable. When taking job interview I have met some of them as an MA pass couldn’t write one paragraph in english.. Samajwadi ke zamane ke UP grads se bach ke raho. Many are literally illiterate. All thanks for Tonti and Tonti ke do maa wala papa.. Pappu who got admission in Stephen’s college on sports quota also is making noises.. Gazab hi hai. If all exam frauds of last 20 years are unmasked, most of them will be ones who are found in violent protests.

The connection b/w the South Indian Murukku (that crunchy, coiled, savory snack we all love) & the ancient medical treatise of the Sushruta Samhita is 1 of the most brilliant, hidden examples of how ancient Indian snack food was originally engineered as preventative medicine. When people think of the Sushruta Samhita, they immediately think of plastic surgery, rhinoplasty & complex surgical tools. But Sushruta was a holistic genius. He knew that the ultimate goal of medicine was to ensure a patient never needed surgery in the 1st place. Volume 1 (Sutra Sthana, Chapter 46) contains an entire, massive section dedicated to Ahara-tattva (the nutritional science of food). And this is where the fascinating origin story of the Murukku begins. In the Sushruta Samhita, Sushruta categorizes deep-fried pastry items under the broad family of Bhakshyas (cooked, chewable foods). Among them, he singles out a distinct item called Śaṣkulī. Over centuries, as the Sanskrit word Śaṣkulī traveled across different regions of India, it underwent phonetic shifts: In the North & West, the word evolved through Prakrit into Chakli (retaining the circular, coiled meaning). In the South cultures translated the physical action of making it, twisting the dough giving us the beautiful descriptive name Murukku (which literally means twisted in Tamil). Sushruta was deeply concerned with the concept of Agni (metabolic digestive fire). He categorized foods based on whether they were Guru (heavy to digest)/Laghu (light to digest). He noted that deep-frying grain dough in ghee makes it highly caloric & strength-giving (Bala-vardhana), but it can be incredibly heavy for the stomach. To fix this chemical problem, ancient Indian cooks did something brilliant that Sushruta documented: they introduced Masha (Black Gram/Urad Dal) into the rice flour matrix. By mixing rice flour with roasted, ground urad dal, they created a complete amino acid profile (rice is low in lysine but high in methionine, while dal is high in lysine but low in methionine). A few might think why did Sushruta spend time documenting a fried, coiled snack in a medical text meant for surgeons? Because of shelf-life & thermodynamics. In ancient India, monks, traders & soldiers traveling across vast empires needed food that met 3 strict scientific conditions: - It could not contain moisture (water causes bacterial spoilage). - It had to be compact & physically rigid so it would not crumble into dust in a horse carriage. - It had to be nutrient-dense to sustain high physical exertion. By taking the Śaṣkulī dough, piping it into tight, concentric, interlocking coils (which structurally reinforces the snack against breaking) & deep-frying it until 100% of the water content evaporated, ancient Indians invented the ultimate preservative-free, shelf-stable survival ration. When you hear the crunch of a Murukku today, you are literally tasting a recipe that was vetted, chemically balanced & medically approved by the Father of Surgery himself, Acharya Sushruta, 1000s yrs ago. So, the next time you serve Murukku/Chakli with tea, you can proudly tell your guests: You are not just eating a snack. You are consuming a highly engineered, ancient Ayurvedic military ration designed to preserve human tissue :))

Rather long but I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did: I am an Indian, and everyone says I lack civic sense. They can burn streets, and vandalize a city after a championship game. I dance at an airport excited about my first foreign trip, and suddenly I am the face of poor civic sense. I am an Indian, and everyone says I steal jobs. They move factories across oceans, shift profits through tax havens. I study, compete, earn a visa, work 18 hours a day, sometimes multiple jobs and somehow I am the one stealing jobs and scamming the system. I am an Indian, and everyone says I am everywhere. I build your software, treat your illness, teach your children, drive your taxis, and open your stores. The world became a village, yet my presence remains a problem. I am an Indian, and everyone says I am too loud. The evening news screams outrage. The internet echoes with anger day and night. I celebrate a wedding, a festival, a victory, and I am told my joy is too loud. I am an Indian, and everyone says I smell of curry. The world smells of gunpowder, of hatred, of division, of endless arguments about race and religion. I carry the fragrance of spices from my grandmother's kitchen, and somehow that is what offends. I am an Indian, and everyone says I have no culture. I come from a civilization that counted the stars when much of the world was still learning maps. I speak languages older than nations. I celebrate hundreds of traditions, yet I am told I have no culture. I am an Indian, and everyone says I am backward. I send missions to the Moon. I build vaccines for millions. I run companies across continents. Yet a viral video of one fool becomes evidence against a billion people. I am an Indian. I celebrate my favorite actor's success with flowers, music, and a few glasses of milk. Others worship influencers who sell outrage, turn every disagreement into a battlefield, and every opinion into a war. Yet my celebration is the one that makes headlines. I am an Indian, and everyone says I gather in crowds. We walk together in processions, celebrating our faith, our culture, our traditions. Everyone is welcome. No shops are looted. No neighborhoods are burned. No one is threatened for thinking differently. We sing. We dance. We pray. And somehow our gathering becomes the problem. I am an Indian, and everyone says I bring my culture everywhere. I light a lamp in a foreign land. I wear a saree in the snow. I teach my children the language of their grandparents. Others build walls between neighbors, argue endlessly over identity, and forget where they came from. Yet I am told I should leave my culture behind. I am an Indian, and everyone says I live in the past. But my past gave me yoga, mathematics, philosophy, meditation, and the idea that the world is one family. The future keeps borrowing from my past, while telling me to be embarrassed by it. I am an Indian, and everyone says I should be ashamed. Ashamed of my accent. Ashamed of my food. Ashamed of my festivals. Ashamed of my traditions. Ashamed of existing. But I am not ashamed. I am the child of farmers and philosophers, scientists and saints, workers and dreamers. *I come from a land that taught the world that truth can be many-sided, that all paths deserve respect, and that the entire world is one family.* *Yes, we have flaws. Every nation does.* *But judge me by my actions, not by your stereotypes.* For I am an Indian. *And before you tell me what is wrong with me, look honestly at what you have normalized in yourself.* For I am an Indian. The world may mock my accent, question my customs, laugh at my celebrations, and judge me through a thousand stereotypes. *Yet I stand tall. For I belong to a civilization older than empires, a culture richer than prejudice, and a people whose spirit refuses to bend.* For I am an Indian.

Lieberman called it affect labelling. The research confirmed it works across anxiety, grief, anger, shame, loneliness and overwhelm. Every difficult feeling responds to the same intervention: name it precisely. Two words maximum. The brain does the rest.

The name sounds British, but it is actually a purely Indian acronym. In 1952, a 55 yr old grocery store owner from Nagpur named Keshav Vishnu Pendharkar decided to shut down his shop, pack up his family of 10 children, & move to Bombay. He wanted to create a chemical-free, swadeshi alternative to the foreign cosmetic brands that were ruling post-independence India. He started his business in a tiny, cramped godown in Parel, Bombay. He named his company after his father: Vishnu Industrial Chemical Company. V-I-C-C-O. There was no British Lord or foreign laboratory. It was just a middle-aged Marathi man & his sons working out of a shed with a dream to revive ancient texts. Keshav Pendharkar’s brother-in-law held a basic degree in Ayurveda. Together, they huddled over ancient scripts & formulated a tooth-cleaning powder made from 20 rare herbs & barks (including Babool, Bakul, & Neem).They called it Vajradanti. In the 1950s, urban Indians were rapidly switching to chemical, white, sweet-tasting toothpastes imported by MNCs like Colgate. When the Pendharkers tried to sell a brown, astringent Ayurvedic powder, shopkeepers laughed them out of their stores. Keshav & his sons refused to surrender. They literally walked the streets of Bombay, going door to door to hand out samples, educating people on how chemical foam was destroying their gums, & manually building their empire 1 household at a time. In 1971, Keshav passed away, & his son, Gajanan Pendharkar, took over. Gajanan looked at the skincare market & saw it was utterly dominated by colonial-legacy snow creams like Afghan Snow, Pond's, & Nivea. All of them were stark white. Gajanan decided to launch a face cream containing Turmeric (Haldi) & Sandalwood oil. When the product launched, shopkeepers panicked. They screamed, "Baap re! If women put this on their faces, it will turn them yellow!" Nobody wanted to buy a yellow cream because the world had been conditioned to believe that beauty products had to be white. The Pendharkars weaponized the traditional Indian wedding ritual of Haldi-Chandan. They sent salesmen into the markets armed with handheld mirrors. The salesmen would manually apply the cream onto the shopkeepers' faces right then & there to prove it absorbed completely into a vanishing base, leaving a glow w/o any yellow stains. If you remember the iconic jingle: "Vicco Turmeric, Nahi Cosmetic, Vicco Turmeric Ayurvedic Cream"... you should know that those words were not just a clever marketing tagline. They were a battle cry born from a massive legal warfare. In 1975, the Central Excise Department of India dropped a bombshell on Vicco. They insisted on classifying Vicco Turmeric & Vajradanti as "Cosmetics." If classified as cosmetics, the govt could levy a crippling 105% luxury tax on the products, which would have priced Vicco completely out of the market & forced them into bankruptcy. The Pendharkars refused to pay. They argued that their products were manufactured under a formal Drug License & were Ayurvedic Medicines (Drugs), which attracted significantly lower taxes. This was not a minor dispute; it turned into a historic, grueling 25 yr legal battle. The case climbed all the way up to the Supreme Court of India. While battling global giants in the market, the family spent their resources fighting their own govt in courtrooms for ~3 decades. Finally, in the 2000s, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Vicco, legally decreeing that their products were indeed medicinal, cementing the truth of their tagline forever. How did a homegrown brand from a Parel godown become globally famous? Through sheer marketing brilliance before the internet existed. In the 1980s, South Asian immigrants abroad were obsessed with watching Bollywood movies on rented VHS video cassettes. Gajanan Pendharkar realized this & started buying ad space directly inside the video cassettes distributed globally. Long before foreign networks recognized Indian brands, families in the US, UK, & Middle East were singing along to the Vajradanti jingle before their favorite movie started. Despite controlling a multi-million dollar empire, the house had only 1 giant mega-kitchen. Every single meal was cooked in massive industrial-sized pots, & the entire family sat on the floor together to eat. Gajanan believed that if the family broke bread separately, the business would fracture into pieces. In the early decades, the sons & grandsons who worked for Vicco did not get individual corporate salaries/luxury allowances. The company took care of all household expenses centrally. If a family member needed a car/a dress/a medical trip, it was cleared by the family elders, ensuring that personal greed could never overtake the company's mission. Vicco did not survive because it was backed by British capital/Western tech. It survived because an Indian family was willing to go door to door with brown tooth powder, rub yellow cream onto skeptical faces, & spend 25 yrs in court defending the scientific validity of Ayurveda. The name might sound like a colonial legacy, but the blood inside the tube is Sampoorna Swadeshi.

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Imagine a man standing on the docks of Calcutta, watching the empty horizon where a ship was supposed to appear. He realizes the future of his country’s science is at the bottom of the sea. Instead of crying, he turns around, walks into a local welding shop, & starts sketching a vacuum pump on a piece of brown packing paper. We celebrate the architects of the atomic age, but we have forgotten the man who actually built the engine. He was the ghost who brought the 1st Cyclotron to India, dragging the future of nuclear physics across a war-torn ocean, only to let others take the bow. In the 1930s, the world of physics was shifting from chalkboards to massive machinery. Dr. Basanti Dulal Nagchaudhuri was at Berkeley, working directly under Ernest Lawrence (the inventor of the Cyclotron). He was not just studying; he was learning how to build the God-Machine, the particle accelerator. In 1941, Nagchaudhuri & his mentor Meghnad Saha secured the parts for India’s 1st Cyclotron from the US. It was a moment of national pride, India was about to enter the elite club of nuclear research. But then, the tragedy struck. The ship carrying the crucial vacuum pumps & magnets was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the middle of World War II. The heart of India’s 1st great machine sank to the bottom of the ocean. Most scientists would have quit. Nagchaudhuri did not. He did not wait for a new shipment. He went to the scrap yards & local factories of Calcutta. He used Jugaad before the word existed, fabricating complex vacuum systems & high-tension transformers from scratch in a colonized, resource-starved India. By 1954, he had succeeded & 1st Cyclotron became fully operational in the East at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. He was the man who trained the 1st gen of Indian nuclear scientists. If Bhabha was the Visionary, Nagchaudhuri was the Engineer of the Infinite. Every cancer hospital in India that uses radiation therapy & every nuclear power plant we operate owes its existence to the technical lineage started by Nagchaudhuri’s Scrap-metal Cyclotron. Like many indian unsung heroes, he sacrificed his personal research to build institutions. He became the Vice-Chancellor of JNU & the Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defence. He was notoriously modest. While his contemporaries were building public personas, he was in the basement of the physics lab, his hands covered in grease, ensuring the pumps were still running. While everyone knows the name Homi Bhabha, almost no 1 knows the man who was his intellectual superior in the lab... the experimentalist who actually "caught" the particles that Bhabha theorized.

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In 1920, the British soap giants (Lever Brothers) had a problem. They could make us smell like a rose, but they could not survive the Indian skin. The heat, the rashes, & the tropical infections were the enemies of the Empire. K.C. Das (I will write about him separately) & the scientists at Calcutta Chemical did not try to mask the heat; they weaponized it. They created Margo... a soap that did not just wash us; it immunized us. The British scientists had tried for yrs to make a Neem soap. They failed. Because Neem oil is notoriously difficult to saponify (turn into soap) w/o losing its medicinal properties/smelling like rotting onions. The Indian chemists used a secret cold-process method. They managed to keep the azadirachtin (the active bug killer in Neem) alive in the bar. When people used Margo, they were not just smelling herbal. They were coating their body in a biological shield. During the massive cholera & smallpox outbreaks in the early 20th century, the Margo smell became the scent of the survivor. It was the only soap the British doctors could not find a flaw in, they were forced to use it themselves. The British had a habit of patenting Latin names. Neem’s scientific name is Azadirachta indica, but it was also called Margosa. K.C. Das shortened it to Margo to make it sound modern, crisp, & international, tricking the British-educated elite into buying a peasant's remedy disguised as a high-end luxury brand. It was the 1st time an Indian brand sold Ugliness as Honesty. The green color became a silent code for Swadeshi (Made in India). If a British officer saw a Margo bar in our house, he knew he was in the home of some1 who trusted the soil more than the Crown's chemicals. The British tried to replicate Margo by creating Neem-scented soaps back in Manchester. They could not get the bite. Margo used pure Neem oil extracted from trees in the Bengal heartland. The British eventually started buying Margo in bulk for their Army Canteens because the White Soaps were causing skin rot in the humid trenches of the North-East & Burma. The British Empire which claimed to civilize India was literally being kept from rotting away by a green bar of soap made by the very subjects they were trying to rule. Every bar of Margo sold helped fund the Swadeshi spirit. The profits were used to train Indian chemists so that India would never have to depend on a British laboratory again. Margo got into the most intimate parts of an Indian's life, their morning bath, & reminded them every single day through that sharp, bitter scent: "You belong to this land." Margo was the 1st brand to realize that "Bitter is Better." While the British were selling the dream of being European (the scent of roses), Margo was selling the reality of being Indian (the scent of Neem). Today, we see Neem extracts in every global skincare brand from L'Oréal to Body Shop. They are all chasing a ghost created in a Calcutta lab in 1920. They are trying to sell us the Green Revolution, but Margo was the 1 that fought the War of the Skin when it actually mattered.

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@pen_528 Saturn, rahu and Jupiter in 5th house, pisces moon, virgo ascendant

This is such awesome work!

Neuralink @neuralink

7 months ago

ALS has gradually taken away Kenneth’s ability to speak. Through Neuralink’s VOICE clinical trial, he’s exploring how a brain-computer interface designed to translate thought to speech could help restore autonomy in his daily life. Watch to learn more:

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#मराठीदिन निमित्त एक मजेशीर गोष्ट. काही वर्षांपूर्वी मुंबईच्या झेवियर्स महाविद्यालयातील काही मुलं मला भेटायला आली. मला म्हणाली -“सर, झेवियर्स महाविद्यालयात खूप पूर्वीपासून मराठी वाङमय मंडळ आहे परंतु काही कारणाने ते अनेक वर्ष निष्क्रीय होतं. आमचे सर आहेत - शिंदे सर - त्यांनी या मंडळाला पुनुरुज्जिवित करायचं ठरवलं आहे. या मंडळाच्या उद्घाटनाच्या कार्यक्रमाला प्रमुख पाहुणा म्हणून आपण यावं अशी आमची इच्छा आहे. तुम्ही याल का?” तरूण मुलांशी संवाद साधायला मी कधीही नकार देत नाही. मी त्वरित होकार दिला. तसा त्यातला एक मुलगा जरा ओशाळून म्हणाला - “एकच प्रॉब्लेम आहे सर. मंडळ नवीन आहे आणि तुम्हाला झेवियर्सची कल्पना आहे. आमच्याकडे बराचसा श्रोतृवर्ग अमराठी आहे. तर तुम्ही तुमचं भाषण इंग्रजीतून कराल का?” मला याची गंमत वाटली. कुणी म्हणेल हे कसलं मराठी मंडळ! पण मला यात एक संधी दिसली. मी म्हटलं मी इंग्रजीत हे भाषण करेन. मुलं खूष होऊन परतली. त्या कार्यक्रमात मी मराठी का बोलली गेली पाहिजे. या विषयावर इंग्रजीतून भाषण केलं. पुण्याचे अनिल गोरे ज्यांना महाराष्ट्र शासनाचा भाषासंवर्धन पुरस्कार दिला गेला आहे, ते एकदा जे म्हणाले होते तेच मी या मुलांना इंग्रजीतून सांगितलं. आपण इंग्रजी बोलतो. उदा. आपण म्हणतो - “Virat Kohli is riding on a wave of popularity.” किंवा “I was surfing channels on my TV.” ही भाषा कुठून आली? तर ही भाषा समुद्रातून आणि नौकायनातून आली आहे. कारण इंग्लंड हा देश पाण्याने वेढलेला आहे. त्यामुळे औरंगाबादला राहणारी मुलगी जेव्हा riding on a wave म्हणते तेव्हा ती second hand अनुभवातून बोलत असते. लाटेवर स्वार होणं म्हणजे काय हे कळायला तो अनुभव स्वतःच्या इंद्रियांनी अनुभवायला हवा! आपली भाषा आपल्या मातीतून उगवते. म्हणूनच हिंदीत - “अफ़वाहों की बाढ़ आती है” आणि मराठीत “अफवांचं पीक येतं”. म्हणूनच मराठीत “पिकतं तिथे विकत नाही” आणि पत्रकार “घोटाळ्याची पाळंमुळं खणून काढतात”. लोक म्हणतात भाषा केवळ एक संवादाचं माध्यम आहे. भाषा संवादाचं माध्यम आहेच पण ‘केवळ’ नव्हे! भाषा संस्कृतीची वाहक आहे. आपली ओळख म्हणजे काही जन्माचा दाखला नाही. आपली ओळख सनातन आहे. भाषा ही आपल्या ओळखीचं एक परिमाण आहे. म्हणूनच तर ज्ञानेश्वर आपल्या रक्तात आहेत आणि तुकाराम आपल्या नेणिवेत. मराठी भाषेमुळेच शिवाजी महाराज म्हटलं की आपल्याला होणारी जाणीव ही इतरांना होणाऱ्या जाणिवेपेक्षा काहीतरी वेगळी आहे. भाषा आपल्या पर्यावरणाशी असलेलं आपलं नातं आहे जे आपल्याला जमीनीशी, वास्तवाशी जोडून ठेवतं. आणि म्हणून जिथे आपण राहतो तिथली भाषा आपल्याला येणं इष्ट असतं. मला ठाऊक नाही की माझ्या बोलण्याचा किती परिणाम झाला पण दोन वर्षांपूर्वी मला झेवियर्स महाविद्यालयात पुन्हा बोलावलं. या वेळी संपूर्ण कार्यक्रम तर मराठीत झालाच पण मीही माझं भाषण पूर्णपणे मराठीत केलं. पुन्हा एकदा माझं आवडतं वाक्य म्हणतो आणि थांबतो. वीज वाचवायची तर तिचा वापर कमी करायला हवा, पण भाषा वाचवायची असेल तर तिचा वापर वाढवायला हवा! #Repost

उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत। क्षुरस्य धारा निशिता दुरत्यया दुर्गं पथस्तत्कवयो वदन्ति॥

Engineers raised one stair by an inch, and it was enough to disrupt muscle memory, showing how strongly habit guides our movements.

Physical activity is the most effective intervention available for promoting brain health and longevity. Recent research demonstrates that regular exercise, even in modest amounts, is effective for enhancing brain volume, improving memory, and reducing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. Beyond its cognitive benefits, moderate physical activity also contributes to extended lifespan and better overall health outcomes. Even regular walking has shown to have powerful impacts on brain structure and function: *️⃣Activity levels equivalent to 4,000 steps per day have been linked to measurable increases in gray matter and white matter volumes (PMID: 38073389) *️⃣A 2011 study showed that 40 minutes of walking, three times per week lead to a 2% increase in hippocampal volume over one year, effectively reversing 1–2 years of age-related atrophy and enhancing spatial memory performance (PMID: 21282661). *️⃣A more recent study suggests that activity levels equivalent to walking just under 3 hours daily for the least active populations could extend lifespan by 11 years on average (doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2024-108125). Even walking is an accessible, non-pharmacological intervention for promoting brain health, reducing disease risk, and enhancing longevity.