India. Economics. Public policy. Technology. History. Culture. Curious by nature, sceptical by choice. I follow the evidence—not the crowd.
Bangalore
Joined February 2012
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Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Mehdi, you were a middle aged man having spent decades in the UK, and having gone to Oxbridge and worked in the higher levels of UK media, when you were recorded describing non-Muslims as "kafirs" & "animals" in a gathering of Muslims. I would not call others bigoted.
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
An unexpected PAYMENT _is Arriving in your Bank Account !
Affirm 777 & share immediately🎉💰
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
I have five direct questions for the Congress party that will puncture their balloon of lies about SIR.
1. If SIR explains PM Modi's victories, how did he win three consecutive Lok Sabha elections in 2014, 2019 and 2024 without it?
2. If CEC Gyanesh Kumar is responsible for Congress's defeats, who was responsible for its 98 electoral losses between 2014 and February 2025, before he became CEC?
3. If EVMs are hacked, why does Congress accept victories in Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana and elsewhere but question the same machines when it loses?
4. If SIR is illegal, were the 10 previous intensive electoral-roll revisions, including those under Congress governments headed by the Gandhis themselves, also illegal?
5. If EVMs, SIR and Gyanesh Kumar explain Congress's defeats, what explains its failure to secure a majority of its own in Tamil Nadu since 1967, West Bengal since 1977, Uttar Pradesh since 1989, Gujarat since 1995 and Odisha since 2000?
I dare you, Mr. @RahulGandhi. No diversions. No excuses. Just five straight answers.
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Congratulations Shehzad on winning #RiseAndFallS2 . May you always Rise .
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Right. I guess that’s why Haryana has controlled crop burning so effectively and Punjab has done zero? Punjab is run by the BJP? Did the BJP also add @gavi to your LinkedIn profile and @SaniaNishtar to Gavi?
A horrible humiliation for Mallikarjun Kharge Sr. He must RESIGN and Karnataka's Maana Mariyadhe kapaadbeku.
Mallikarjun ji Kharge lost grip as Congress Chief.
Siddharamiah met Gandhis to complain against CM Sivakumar
on audio video scandal
Veerappa Moily is openly challenging kharge pulling up seniors & cadres for not attending
Ramlila rally
Right time before self respect of Kharge ji
further put to test.
Best is quietly quit, before your writ further dangles down.
What a pity?
At 86 years a
Horrible Humiliation
@kharge @DrVeerappaMoily @kharge @siddaramaiah
@DKShivakumar
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Mallikarjun ji Kharge lost grip as Congress Chief.
Siddharamiah met Gandhis to complain against CM Sivakumar
on audio video scandal
Veerappa Moily is openly challenging kharge pulling up seniors & cadres for not attending
Ramlila rally
Right time before self respect of Kharge ji
further put to test.
Best is quietly quit, before your writ further dangles down.
What a pity?
At 86 years a
Horrible Humiliation
@kharge @DrVeerappaMoily @kharge @siddaramaiah
@DKShivakumar
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
"Demography", not Democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century!
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
My thanks to the Global Sanatan Leaders Association and the Bengali human rights campaigners who brought me a detailed report on the persecution of religious minorities in Bangladesh when they came to Parliament last month.
"UK MP Bob Blackman Raises Bangladesh Minority Concerns with GSL" globalsanatanleaders.org/uk-…
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
“Shift Periyar statue from temple land to suitable location in 4 weeks.”
- Madras High Court
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Let me ask you…
If India’s Metro network had continued expanding at the pace it did before 2014, how long would the wait be for cities like Pune to have a metro?
YEARS….no…DECADES perhaps.
And that was UNACCEPTABLE.
In 2014, India had just 248 km of Metro lines across 5 cities.
Today, we have nearly 1,200 km across 26 cities.
Over 1 crore people travel by Metro every day.
The impact goes beyond statistics or numbers.
It means less time in traffic, more family time, greater productivity and better opportunities.
This is the transformation we are working towards for urban India!
What makes Pune Metro's new Pink Line so special?
23 km connecting Hinjewadi's IT hub with Shivajinagar.
Operated by women.
Almost a third of the electricity needs planned from solar energy.
Tomorrow, this Rs. 8,300 crore infra enhancement will be inaugurated!
A significant boost to 'Ease of Living' for Pune!
pib.gov.in/PressReleaseDetai…
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
This is same case even with Bengaluru.
Pre 2014, Bengaluru had just 7km. After inauguration of Pink Line it will touch 103 Km.
Increase only because of Modi Govt.
Unfortunately, State Congress Govt hasn’t submitted even one new metro line request in last 3 years!
Let me ask you…
If India’s Metro network had continued expanding at the pace it did before 2014, how long would the wait be for cities like Pune to have a metro?
YEARS….no…DECADES perhaps.
And that was UNACCEPTABLE.
In 2014, India had just 248 km of Metro lines across 5 cities.
Today, we have nearly 1,200 km across 26 cities.
Over 1 crore people travel by Metro every day.
The impact goes beyond statistics or numbers.
It means less time in traffic, more family time, greater productivity and better opportunities.
This is the transformation we are working towards for urban India!
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Tom Hiddleston, the guy who plays Loki, sat down on a New York subway bench and casually explained why chasing happiness makes you less happy.
Turns out he knows exactly what he's talking about. He has a double first in Classics from Cambridge, where Mary Beard was one of his supervisors, and what he's describing is a 2,300-year-old idea from Aristotle that psychologists have spent the last 20 years backing up.
Aristotle split happiness into two things we usually mash together. Hedone was pleasure, like the sunrise feeling Tom talks about. Eudaimonia, which usually gets translated as flourishing, was something you could only judge across a whole life. His line was that one swallow doesn't make a spring, and one good day doesn't make a person happy.
Psychologist Iris Mauss tested the chasing part in 2011. Her team had some people read a fake newspaper article about how important happiness is, and then everyone watched a feel-good clip of a figure skater winning gold. The people who'd been told happiness matters came out of that clip feeling worse than everybody else. When the clip was a sad one, both groups felt about the same. Mauss thinks wanting happiness raises the bar for every moment, so even a good one can feel like it fell short.
Roy Baumeister went after the lasting part in 2013 with a study of 397 adults. Money and comfort predicted happiness and barely moved meaning at all. Stress and worry actually went along with more meaning, and so did time spent thinking about the past and the future. Raising kids pushed meaning up and happiness down at the same time.
Tom's version was "I'm doing it for my kids. I'm doing it for my mom."
Daniel Kahneman put real numbers on that trade. He had 909 working women walk back through the day before, hour by hour, and rate how each part felt. Taking care of their kids scored 3.86 out of 6, below watching TV, below cooking, and just a hair above housework.
Ask those same women about their lives, though, and they'll tell you their kids are the biggest source of joy they have.
I have two kids, and most mornings I can feel both of those answers before breakfast.
That's what Aristotle was getting at the whole time, a life that can score pretty badly hour by hour and still add up to something great, and Tom just explained it better on a subway bench than most professors manage in a full lecture.
Tom Hiddleston says happiness is overrated and spending your life chasing it can actually make you unhappy
"Happiness is overrated. Meaning is underrated. Happiness is like a sunrise or a sunset. Bear with me"
"You're there. It's lovely. You're present with it. The sun's rising or the sun is setting. It's perfect. After 15 minutes, the moment is over and it's gone. Trying to sustain it is impossible because it's over"
"And a life spent chasing the permanence of that feeling will make you unhappy because you can't hold on to it. The moment you try to hold on to it, it slips through your fingers and is lost"
"Meaning is a structure that only you create in your own life, an architecture with your own particular spiritual fingerprint, whereby if you're going through a hard time, if you're going through challenge, struggle, obstacles, suffering or pain, only you know why you're going through it"
"You might know, this is hard now. I'm doing it for my kids. I'm doing it for my mom. I'm doing it for my future"
"And then it makes enduring the hard times bearable because you know what it means"
"And meaning - this is the take - meaning yields joy. Joy is deeper than happiness"
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Dear Congress,
35% hike in BMTC fares, 25% in KSRTC fares, costlier milk, and all this just as lakhs of Kannadigas gear up to celebrate Deepavali with their families. Some festive gift this is!
Kannadigas will not forget this. They will return the favour in 2028, at polling booths.
And when that happens, don't blame the EVMs, cry foul over SIR, or go looking for another excuse!
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
“Head of content”, “Head of growth”, “Head of storytelling”, “Head of GTM” - What's up with all these roles?
There are so many new tags and labels right now and this is how I understand them.
Back in the day, head of content, head of marketing and head of growth were three different roles.
The head of content made sure everything written was approved and written by the content team. Their focus was the information, the knowledge and the way it should be written. They were the storytellers. The writers.
Optimizing it was someone else’s job.
The marketers got the final draft from them and optimized it. They added keywords and made it perform.
Then these two roles became one. Nobody was looking for writers. Everybody was looking for marketers and that was the cue for writers to hone this skill. So they learned to optimize their own content for SEO, social media, research papers, decks, ads and copies. They became copywriters, social media leads, everything. It was easier for them because they already had the main hard skill, writing. Everything else you can learn on the job.
Head of growth was a very different role. Honestly, the head of growth was always the performance marketing person. They had a budget. They were spending crores and crores and growing the channel through ads. Organic leads and acquisition always belonged to the head of marketing folks. That’s why head of growth wasn’t an easy role to find in most companies.
Then the head of growth turned into GTM (Go-to-market). Everybody started spending on Meta ads, which is understandable. To crack D2C or a B2C consumer market, you have to crack Instagram. So you have to crack Meta Ads, Google Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, some kind of ads.
Till now we are doing fine. We have a head of marketing and a head of GTM. A Series A, B or C startup will have huge teams where everybody is an expert in one specific skill. In a small startup, one person does a lot of things. Someone organic becomes the marketer. Someone performance becomes the GTM person. That’s pretty much it.
All of these roles needed tools too.
> For organic: Ahrefs, Semrush, Search Console, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Mixpanel, PostHog.
> For email campaigns: WebEngage.
> For GTM: Clay, the Meta dashboard, ad tools for LinkedIn, X and Reddit, and Apollo or Exa for leads and outreach.
Then AI came into the picture. Now AI can figure out the tools. AI can run the tools. AI can write the copies. You can give it the books you follow and your notes over the years and teach it to work like you. You can make it an agent.
That’s when people realized the one skill AI still lacks is writing. AI writes like an AI. It doesn’t understand that when you talk to an audience, it has to feel like a human wrote it, without sounding salesy or like marketing. The content, the formatting, the way AI writes is so same that everybody started sounding the same. That’s why the stop-slop skills came out.
Even after all of that, big companies couldn’t differentiate themselves from the smaller companies and individuals writing with AI. Everything sounded the same.
So they realized they need to hire a head of content again. A head of storytelling. Someone whose hard skill is just researching and writing, using their own fingers and their own brain.
Between all of this, people decided the only way to tell five writers apart is what they have consumed. Their taste. What they read, what their opinions are, how they think and the chaos that comes with it. That’s why you see “disgustingly talented” and “disgustingly tasteful” everywhere. Everybody is using these extreme adjectives to spotlight how they’re different from other writers, marketers, GTM or growth people. And it’s getting more difficult every day.
That’s how I became a marketer from a writer. I got inbound leads from my personal blog on Substack. In between the chaos, founders stopped caring about writing for a while. But writing made the comeback, and writers are the happiest :)
Imminent Intellectual retweeted
Two out of three people will spend their own money just to make a stranger poorer.
Economists Daniel Zizzo and Andrew Oswald tested this with real cash. Players could anonymously pay to wipe out other players' winnings, and they got nothing out of it. Even when it cost them 25 cents to destroy a dollar, they kept going. By the end, half of all the money in the lab had been burned.
Doing nothing would have left every one of them richer. They paid anyway, because watching someone else lose was worth more to them than the cash. Researchers have been poking at that urge for decades, and what they found backs Naval up.
Over at Harvard's School of Public Health, researchers asked 257 people a simple question. Would you rather make $100,000 a year while everyone around you makes $200,000, or make $50,000 while everyone else makes $25,000? Prices are the same in both worlds.
About half picked the $50,000. They'd cut their own pay in half just to come out ahead of the people around them.
When the same survey asked about vacation, 85% just wanted the most weeks off, even if their coworkers got more. Makes sense when you think about it. Nobody's checking how many vacation days you have, so there's nothing to compare. Your salary and your house get compared all day long, and that's where envy lives.
Economists later got to watch this play out with real paychecks. In 2008, the Sacramento Bee put every University of California employee's salary online in a searchable database. David Card and three colleagues told a random group of UC staff about the site, then surveyed everyone a few days later.
People who found out they were paid below their department's median got less happy at work and started looking at other jobs. And the people who found out they were above the median? No happier. Not even a little.
So you can get ahead of people your whole career and it barely registers, but one coworker passing you is enough to wreck your week. There's no number where that ever stops.
Your brain is in on it too. In a 2009 study published in Science, researchers scanned 19 people while they read about a rival who had more than them. The envy showed up in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain involved in processing physical pain. When the rival then hit a rough patch, the brain's reward center lit up. The people who felt the most envy got the biggest kick out of watching the fall.
Envy only ever gets paid one way, and it's when somebody else loses. That's exactly what those players in the money-burning experiment were buying.
There's an old Russian joke that called all of this long before anyone ran a study. A peasant with one cow gets a single wish from a sorcerer. His neighbor has two cows. The peasant uses his wish to have one of the neighbor's cows killed.
A second cow would have satisfied greed.
