We, the People of India

Have started sowing potatoes today. To everyone who mocked or abused me for being a farmer, Tax free income, here’s a reality check. Today, a 50 kg bag of potatoes is selling for just ₹250. Meanwhile, businesses sell 100 grams of fries for ₹100. Now decide for yourself who actually makes the bigger profit: the farmer or the business? So far, I’ve already spent: ₹100 per bag just for cold storage of seed potatoes. ₹100 per bag on sowing. That’s ₹200 already spent, with many more expenses still to come before harvest, including irrigation, fertilizers, labour, pesticides, transport, and more. In the end, a farmer is often left with barely ₹5–10 profit on a 50 kg bag, if that. Despite all this, farmers still don’t abuse anyone. We simply work hard, feed the nation, and hope for a fair return! The day Punjab, India has large-scale food processing plants, farmers will finally be able to earn what they truly deserve. 😀🙏🏻 @MOFPI_GOI @ChouhanShivraj

When the BJP took over in Karnataka in 2019, after 6 years of CONgress rule, there were major floods & a huge deficit From that situation, despite COVID, they brought us back to a surplus & we voted them out Now, 3 years later, we have CONgis, & a huge deficit again! 🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤦🏾‍♀️

#WATCH | Delhi | On Uniform Civil Code, Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Sanjay Karol says, "If you want to see secularism and Article 44 in practice, you must visit Bihar, where people from different communities and religions come together to worship during Chhath Puja... When it comes to Article 44, my view, it is the need of the hour..."

The entire Indian system is geared towards *prevention*. *Prevent* all the bad things from happening, because recourse to cure is so poor. Why is there no cure? Courts and police are total failures - for instance, if somebody commits a financial fraud, it can take decades to prosecute them. Hence prevent the fraud - throw multiple OTPs at the user for a Rs 5000 fund transfer. Banks make you do KYC like fanatics because they are trying to *prevent* the last bad actor from getting away - if millions are to be tortured for it, so be it. This prevention-first mindset throws sand in the wheels for everything. It makes life hell for consumers and small businesses. Just imagine what the accumulated cost is of preventing all the bad things from happening - surely it shaves off many basis points from GDP growth when you stack up all of it. And yet the cheats, criminals, troublemakers and frauds all find ways to do what they do anyway. Those who are just trying to run their business and get through life are burdened with this mountain of compliance and paperwork. None of this moves babus and ministers - they live in a parallel reality where somebody else works (at taxpayer expense of course) to remove these frictions from their existence. Then they blithely bark at poor consumers and business operators: “ek form hi to hai, bhar do”. But of course it is never one form - every leech in the system demands a form and a submission. Stacked up, it goes into hundreds of pages of documents and dozens of tasks. The associated parasite lobby of lawyers, consultants, company secretaries and chartered accountants makes merry. They lobby the government for more regulations and offer compliance services to hapless people. In exchange, they place the government elite’s nepo kids in jobs. This parasite gang has a field day because more documents means more business for them. They are joined by economists and intellectuals, who want to join the leeching and bloodsucking bacchanalia. This intellectual cabal wants to snag a coveted role in the “world’s best” prize winner central bank or other sarkaari gig. Productivity dies in India, businesses slow down and overall it is a slow-motion economic disaster. In isolation we feel happy to have 6-7% economic growth. Decades go on then somebody says - oh, how did Singapore, Vietnam and China do so well? We look at the delta and feel awkward. We justify it saying “we have democracy”. The super-cabal didn’t just prevent accidents or disasters like they claimed - they killed off and prevented growth and progress with it. Mega accidents and disasters happened anyway. Enjoy the democracy. Praise the cockroaches and jholachhaps. Celebrate the thugs, parasites, leeches and bureaucrat-goons all around you. Mera Bharat Mahaan!

I have a good story on Tryptomer. If you are curious about how doctors make decisions and how it can affect you, read on. In the late 1990s, I had a bout of malaria that would not respond to standard treatments. It was some form of quinine-resistant strain. Doctors put me on a high dosage of mefloquine. Malaria went away but I got hit with something inexplicable at that time. Once I got off mefloquine, I developed severe symptoms. Dizziness. Tinnitus. Migraines. Neck pain. Balance issues. And the worst of all: panic attacks. I had always thought of myself as a stable person. These attacks came out of nowhere. No trigger. No warning. No understanding. I did not even have the tight words to describe. I went to emergency once believing that I was having a heart attack. This was the late 90s. There was not a lot of information online. I went to doctor after doctor (about 10) Every single one dismissed the mefloquine connection. This is something else. Malaria does not cause this. Tell me about your job, you are probably stressed. The migraines and neck pain were getting unbearable. A neurologist prescribed Tryptomer without telling me what it was. I started taking it. Within days, I was sleeping constantly. Groggy all the time. But my mood was strangely elevated. I was feeling inexplicably happy while being unable to function properly. When I went back, the doctor casually mentioned it was an antidepressant that could double as a pain reliever at low dosages. I could not tolerate it. And weaning off took weeks. And I kept going from one doctor to the next, becoming a hypochondriac in the process, which only made the dismissals worse. A patient who has seen 10 doctors is no longer a patient. He is a “difficult case.” Finally, a doctor at Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai saw the connection. He put me on a treatment plan that helped to some extent. Several years later, out of curiosity, I looked up mefloquine again. The FDA had by then issued a black box warning for it. The highest level of warning FDA gives. It listed side effects including panic attacks, anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, and suicidal thoughts. This gave me useful insights about how doctors make decisions. As part of my job, I have interviewed hundreds of doctors and it checks out. Doctors are trained to trust published studies over patient stories. This is generally a good thing. You do not want a doctor who changes treatment based on every patient story. Evidence-based medicine exists for a reason. But there is a catch. When the studies have not caught up to reality, or when a doctor has not caught up to the studies, the patient’s lived experience gets dismissed as paranoia. Many doctors are rather poor at statistics. They may not understand relative risk, base rates, or the difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence. “No published study links mefloquine to panic attacks” became “mefloquine does not cause panic attacks” in the view of my doctors. You have to listen to your body but a story without data or evidence will be disimissed. This is where AI can help. Not as a replacement for your doctor. But as an advocate that gives you data and language I bet many doctors don't see the mefloquine connection even today. The doctor remains essential. AI cannot examine you. It cannot feel your neck. It cannot clinically correlate your blood work. But it surely can help you have a more meaningful conversation with your doctor.

#WATCH | Delhi: On PM Modi's tweet, Congress leader Supriya Shrinate says, "There are two points. PM Modi has acknowledged that elections conducted via ballot are credible, while there is public skepticism regarding EVMs. As the Prime Minister, it is your responsibility to address and resolve this skepticism and conduct elections using ballots. Second, why did the BJP lose in Varanasi? If a Lok Sabha election were to be held using ballots, you could end up losing Varanasi entirely... By acknowledging that ballots are more credible, Prime Minister Modi is effectively admitting that there is an issue with EVMs... Explain how you lost Varanasi when ballots were used..."