Back to work…

…and feeling good about it !

I started my journey to understand Bharat with a newsletter in 2003-2004.

Some of you may remember that my earliest attempt at reaching to a wider community was through sharing links to thought-provoking & interesting articles or news-reports I had come across.

It is been 20 years since. Much has changed. Most noticeably in the information we now have access to. It is a deluge. Curation thus becomes even more central, useful and important.

And so here we are. I am going to start writing & curating publicly again – after what feels like ages but has only been a few years.

Still discovering Substack and all its features, so this newsletter will be pretty basic for now. These are also the very first lines I am writing after a very long time. I want to keep this short, useful and informative. So this is it for now.

Below links to several interesting stuff I read, learnt or listened to last week. Always grateful for comments, suggestions, thoughts. Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!

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This was probably one of the best pieces of news this weekend: India to demand treasures including Koh-i-Noor in colonial ‘reckoning’ !

Also read, “Our museums (&) the royal family are in possession of billions of pounds worth of Indian loot. When we annexed parts of India… there were representatives of our museums… to take things, soldiers took loot & sold it, too” by @Sathnam writing in The Guardian.

A short thread I shared last week on the surprising link between Taj Mahal, ArthaShastra & Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation (inaccurately known as the Indus Valley civilisation).

And an unusual one related to the “folk wisdom” of walking or sitting barefeet, with direct contact with the ground (drawn primarily from this Integrative and lifestyle medicine strategies should include Earthing (grounding) (Nov 2019) and this “The neuromodulative role of earthing” (Jul 2011).

Turns out that “Earthing” (also referred to as grounding)… stabilizes the physiology at the deepest levels, reduces inflammation, pain, and stress, improves blood flow, energy, and sleep, and generates greater well-being. Such effects are profound, systemic, and foundational, and often develop rapidly.

Earthing is as simple as routinely walking barefoot outdoors and/or using inexpensive grounding systems indoors while sleeping or sitting, practices that restore a lost and needed electric connection with the Earth.

Apparently, of all the major (global) emitters, India is the only country set to have national per capita consumption emissions within the 1.5?C-compatible per capita level in 2030. (graphic below)

And finally, deep from the archives of the blog, is this post, “Does no one remember the Indian contribution to Technology“

It talks about the remarkable advances made in ancient India in technology and metallurgical sciences in particular (remember the “Iron Pillar” of Mehrauli?).

It’s a long post that deserves to be summarised. I hope to get to it someday. For now though, I am really looking for the original article (the link to the source is broken) and the person who wrote it under the pseudonym, “Karigar”. Karigar’s work deserves wider acknowledgement but more importantly, I would like to get in touch with the author. Hopefully our connected community could help locate this selfless researcher.