Raj MKK

There is also a chapter on entrepreneurship in the Grade 9 Social Science Part 2. It explains basics of profit & loss account, business plans and so. Most importantly, it presents risk-taking, innovation and business as a positive activity - quite different from how previous textbook portrayed it (with emphasis on "hoarding" and "black-markets"). 2/2

For twenty years, a British man meditated, studied ancient teachings, and searched for the peace that spiritual masters had promised him. Then, in 1997, he met a Frenchman who suggested that the very effort to find peace was preventing him from recognizing it. The man's name was Rupert Spira. He had spent much of his adult life searching for a state of consciousness that, according to the teaching he would later share with thousands of people, he had never actually left. Rupert was born in London in 1960. At fifteen he discovered the poetry of Rumi, the Persian mystic who wrote about the disappearance of the separate self. At seventeen he began studying Advaita Vedanta and practising mantra meditation. For the next twenty years, he meditated twice daily, studied Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Krishnamurti, and searched for an answer to a question that had occupied spiritual traditions for centuries. Who are we, really? Meanwhile, he became an accomplished potter, apprenticing under Michael Cardew and spending years shaping clay into bowls and vessels. His hands worked with physical objects. His attention kept returning to the one experiencing them. In the mid-1990s, he travelled to America hoping to meet the spiritual teacher Robert Adams. But Adams died before they could meet. During that journey, Rupert heard about another teacher, a Frenchman named Francis Lucille. Several months later, they met. Francis said something remarkably simple: "Meditation is a universal yes to everything" No secret technique. No instruction to silence the mind. No promise of some extraordinary state waiting at the end of years of discipline. For Rupert, the encounter brought his search to a turning point. He later described it as coming home. And the strange part was that he had not gone anywhere. Over the following twelve years, he explored with Francis the beliefs and bodily sensations that create the feeling of being a separate person. The teaching was deceptively simple. You believe you are a body that possesses awareness. But look at your actual experience. > You are aware of thoughts. > You are aware of sensations. > You are aware of the world around you. Everything you experience changes. But what knows the changes? A thought appears. You know it. Fear arises. You know it. Even the feeling of being a separate person is something you are aware of. Can the awareness that knows all these things itself be found as an object? This became the foundation of Rupert's Direct Path. Instead of trying to become enlightened, he invited people to investigate the awareness that was already present. And this is the part of his teaching that gets lost when spirituality becomes another self-improvement project. Most people spend their lives believing happiness exists somewhere in the future. The next relationship. The next achievement. The next meditation retreat. The next version of themselves. Even the spiritual seeker is searching for something to acquire. But according to Rupert, what we fundamentally are is not something that can be acquired. You cannot become the awareness that knows your experience. You already are that awareness. In 2008, he published The Transparency of Things, bringing this understanding to a wider audience. His books and retreats would eventually reach people around the world. But the remarkable part of Rupert Spira's story is not that a man meditated for twenty years and finally discovered peace. It is that he spent twenty years searching for something he came to understand had been present through every moment of the search. The mind kept asking how to arrive. The answer was to investigate whether the one who was searching had ever truly been separate from what it sought.

Mathew Joseph has been saying this for years, and I’m totally with him on this. Having witnessed the growth of many young Malabari entrepreneurs in Dubai, particularly those from Kannur, Kozhikode and Malappuram, I genuinely believe the Malabari business community deserves to be studied alongside communities like the Marwaris, Sindhis, Banias, Chettiars etc. Based on what I’ve seen in the markets of Deira and Bur Dubai, even management consulting giants could learn a thing or two from them about building successful businesses with remarkably little capital and limited resources. One example from my own experience is young Malabaris in Dubai pioneered social commerce and turned it into a viable business model long before it became mainstream. That entrepreneurial instinct deserves far more recognition.

1 in 7 rupees in India did not exist a year ago. M3 money supply grew 16% this year. Inflation, on paper, is 5.5%. This is the most under-discussed, persistent problem in the Indian economy. This 16% “hidden tax” is starting to show up everywhere: 1. Gold is up 17% in INR - almost exactly the M3 money supply increase. Interesting, right? 2. Domestic GST collections are up 15.8%. Also almost exactly the growth in money supply. The “record GST” is just taxing more money being printed. 3. GST on imports is up 42%, because the rupee fell 7.6%, on top of increased costs. We shouldn’t celebrate paying more tax on the same iPhone. 4. The most egregious one: 7.8% real GDP growth assumes prices across the whole economy rose just 2.3%. (Nominal GDP grew 10.3%. Use the 5.5% CPI instead and real growth is closer to 4.5%.) Does your lived experience validate a laughable 2.3% inflation? 5. The one thing that did NOT keep up is your portfolio. Since 1997, money supply is up 44x and the Sensex is up 20x. Put every INR you had into Indian stocks for 30 years and the money printer beat you by 2X. Taxes keep going up. Capital controls keep tightening. Inflation keeps going up. The structural problems, courts, land, labour and the cost of capital, stay exactly where they were, hidden under a nominal GDP number. We are printing like there’s no tomorrow and pretending nothing is wrong. Ludwig von Mises called inflation “the true opium of the people administered to them by anti-capitalist governments and parties.” Printing is the easiest way to keep welfare flowing and the headlines green without fixing a single structural problem. Inflation is the most immoral tax that we pay, without knowing we’re paying it.

sam: local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources “a lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that”

Incredible results by Indian companies during these tough global times. Its a matter of time, market will start respecting and rewarding them through stock price. Click to view this in StockEdge sedg.in/igv3251d

On @IndiaToday at 9pm,Surjit Bhalla and Santosh Mehrotra debate the World Bank's claim that extreme poverty in India has fallen to 2.6%. Both are distinguished economists, but the viewer is left none the wiser. Is the decline credible? A person may have escaped extreme hunger and destitution but still be unable to afford adequate nutrition, housing, transport, healthcare or education. Such a person is no longer extremely poor but remains economically vulnerable. The two economists kept taking swipes at each other and even the anchor( !!) but the question is which measure is appropriate for the claim being made. The issue that Bhalla and Mehrotra should have explained to viewers is: Has India merely reduced extreme destitution, or has it enabled most Indians to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living? Surely a TV debate should help ordinary viewers understand what these figures mean, rather than leave them to decide which economist sounds more convincing.

An interesting interview from @blsanthosh With BJP - the party - now marking 75 yrs, this is a good insider account of the challenges. It has won: -Art 370 -Ram Mandir -Economic Nationalism -BENGAL! But challenge is -training 180–190 mayors expected once civic polls are done -380+ of ~750 zila panchayat presidencies -48,000+ block councillors, the count that forced a new training camp -Do these leaders know / understand governance? The newcomer problem: -BLS: "Without new joining, there will be no freshness" -There are levels to integration within party -Some aspects are easy but rest take time. The MAIN CHALLENGES: -Ram Mandir and 370 were "palpable" and "visible" -What's left: decolonisation, and an NEP "yet to take root" -India missed the industrial revolution. -These are tough issues to communicate

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says the muli-trillion dollar AI data center build out is a bubble. We are investing in creating capabilities like data curation, reinforcement learning, and most crucially the compiler infrastructure to ensure AI output can be verified but we will not chase the investment bubble. This is just our normal prudence. To some people that would sound defeatist, but we will talk in 5 years.

Dr Varghese Kurien used to welcome every new batch of recruits at the Institute of Rural Management in Anand by saying - "I can only provide you with infrastructure but your have to give it a soul" Ambani/Adani can provide Infra but who will rise up and give it a model/soul?