Mathai D🇮🇳 @mathewsoft

Leo Paredes shared this piece of artwork after Argentina won in 2022. It's coming true once again. The new guard protecting their GOAT 🐐

S. Janaki Ji refused the Padma Bhushan in 2013 and said she deserved the Bharat Ratna instead. A lot of people found that arrogant at the time. Most of North India does not know her name. Almost all of India has heard her voice. If you have ever heard an old South Indian film song playing in a shop, a bus, a wedding, it was probably her. So let me tell you who she was. Her full name was Sistla Sreeramamurthy Janaki. Born 23 April 1938 in Pallapatla, a village in Guntur district. Her father was an Ayurvedic doctor and a teacher. She spent most of her childhood in Sircilla. She sang on a stage for the first time at the age of nine. In her twenties, an uncle told her to go to Chennai and try working with a composer named R. Sudarsanam at AVM Studios. She went. She got her first film song in 1957. A Tamil film called Vidhiyin Vilayattu. She was 19. In that very first year, she recorded songs in six different languages. Six. In year one. Across her career she recorded around 48,000 songs. In roughly 20 languages. Kannada the most, then Malayalam, then Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Odia, Tulu, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Konkani, Sanskrit. She also sang in English, Japanese, German and Sinhala. Yes, 48,000. Her career ran about 60 years. That works out to more than two songs a day, every day, for six decades. Including the days she was sick, travelling, grieving, tired. While her mother tongue was Telugu, but she could speak and write Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi. Malayalis claim her as theirs. Kannadigas claim her as theirs. Tamils claim her as theirs. All of them are correct. :) They called her the queen of expression and modulation. Meaning she could change how a song felt with tiny things. A slight break in a word. A softer breath. She could sound like a village girl in one song and a heartbroken woman in the next and a child in the one after that. That is why composers fought to book her. Infact, Ilaiyaraaja Ji had heard her voice while assisting the composer G. K. Venkatesh. When he got his own first film, Annakkili in 1976, he asked her to sing three songs. All three became huge. That started something. For the next two decades, Ilaiyaraaja and Janaki produced hit after hit. He knew exactly what her voice could do and kept stretching it. She became the first choice for anything with a village setting, anything that needed rawness. Ilaiyaraaja sang around 200 duets with her himself. Three of her four National Awards came from his compositions. And eventually she became the only singer to have won state awards under all three of the giants. M. S. Viswanathan. Ilaiyaraaja. A. R. Rahman. Imagine, three generations of music. Three completely different styles. She worked across all of them and was excellent in all of them. A 40 year span of staying relevant while the entire sound of Indian cinema changed twice. Her first National Award came in 1981 for a Malayalam song, Ettumanoorambalathil, from a film called Oppol. She won four National Awards in all, and 33 State Film Awards. Thirty three. She also had a Hindi chapter that almost nobody remembers. Bappi Lahiri heard her singing a Hindi song for a Tamil film at Prasad Studio and was floored. He brought her to Bombay. She ended up singing duets with Kishore Kumar. Now, her personal life was much harder than the discography. She married V. Ramprasad in 1959. He backed her career fully and used to travel with her to recordings. He died in 1997 of a cardiac arrest. Her son Murali Krishna died this January, just six months ago. She is survived by her granddaughter, Apsara Vydyula, who announced her death on Instagram. She wrote that to the world Janaki was an iconic voice, and to them she was a grandmother whose warmth and humility they will carry forever. She ended her singing career in 2017 with a concert in Mysuru. The last song she chose was a Malayalam lullaby, Amma Poovinum. She picked a lullaby to close out 48,000 songs. :) Now back to the Padma Bhushan. In 2013 the government offered it to her. It is India's third highest civilian honour. She said no. She said it had come far too late. And she said if the country actually wanted to recognise her work, it should have been the Bharat Ratna. At the time, plenty of people called that ego. But look at what she was sitting on when she said it. 48,000 songs. Twenty languages. Four Nationals. Thirty three state awards. Six decades. Work with every major composer across three generations. A voice that raised entire regions. Lata Ji got the Bharat Ratna in 2001. Bhimsen Joshi got it in 2008. M. S. Subbulakshmi got it in 1998. Janaki was 75 when they offered her the third best one. She had every right to feel that the country had taken her for granted. And she said so out loud, without an agent or a PR team softening it. But honestly, what bothers me is that she is being introduced to half the country today, in a condolence tweet, at 88, after she is gone. She was not obscure. She was not niche. Her voice was in millions of homes for sixty years. She was just South Indian in a country where national fame is still mostly decided in Hindi. If you have never heard her, do not scroll past this. Go put on Thumbi Vaa Thumbakudathil. Or Vasantha Panchami Naalil. Or Singara Velane Deva. You do not need to understand the words. You will understand the voice in about ten seconds. That is the whole point of her. She never needed you to know the language.

Narendra Modi @narendramodi

a day ago

The passing of the distinguished playback singer S. Janaki Amma is an irreparable loss to the world of music and culture. Her songs in various languages were popular across generations. They gave voice to every emotion with unparalleled grace as well as versatility. Her melodies

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Snøhetta’s Shanghai Grand Opera House will officially open on October 17, 2026. Now entering its final phase on the banks of the Huangpu River, the 146,786-square-meter complex is defined by a sweeping roof inspired by an unfolding fan. Its surface rises from ground level as a spiraling public staircase, leading to a rooftop plaza designed to remain accessible 24 hours a day, throughout the year. Inside are three performance venues seating 2,000, 1,200 and 1,000 people, alongside restaurants, galleries, educational spaces, libraries and small cinemas. The inaugural season will run until February 20, 2027, with 47 productions presented across 82 performances. Architecture: Snøhetta with ECADI

One Dutch company builds the only machine on Earth that can print an advanced AI chip. It weighs 180 tons, takes up as much floor space as a school bus, and ships to customers in 40 containers, 20 trucks, and three Boeing 747s. A single unit costs between $180 million and $400 million. Nobody else on the planet can make one. The machine is an ASML extreme ultraviolet lithography system, the tool that prints the pattern onto a chip. The process inside it is hard to picture. A generator fires droplets of molten tin, each about a third the width of a human hair, into a sealed vacuum chamber 50,000 times a second. A laser hits every droplet twice: once to flatten it into a pancake, once to blast it into plasma, a kind of superheated gas. That plasma burns at roughly 220,000 degrees Celsius, close to 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The flash of light it gives off has a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, the exact size needed to carve the smallest features onto a chip. This light gets soaked up by ordinary glass, which makes normal lenses useless inside the machine. So it aims the light using mirrors instead, made by the German optics firm Zeiss and polished smoother than any surface humans have ever built. Blow one of those mirrors up to the size of Germany and its tallest bump would still be under a millimeter. Calling it European innovation holds up. ASML is Dutch, the mirrors are German, and the powerful lasers come from TRUMPF, also German. But ASML builds only about 15 percent of the machine itself. The rest comes from a web of roughly 800 suppliers scattered around the world, which ASML spent decades pulling together into one production line. That supply web is the barrier no rival can cross. Nikon and Canon, the old kings of chip printing, looked at this technology and quit. Building it from scratch would take an estimated 15 years and $10 billion. Back in 2012, when it was still a gamble, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung handed ASML $5.4 billion for a piece of the company, just to make sure the thing got finished. It got finished. ASML is now worth around $690 billion, the most valuable technology company in Europe. And every NVIDIA chip behind the current AI boom was built by TSMC, on machines it could only buy from one company in the Netherlands.

Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam

a day ago

European innovation makes the world go around. Without this machine, no AI.

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Vini Jr enjoying his summer in Italy ☀️

🚨 Bengaluru-based Vimag Labs has developed software-defined magnet technology, eliminating the need for rare earth materials in EV motors and reducing dependency on China. 👏

🚨 If Lionel Messi wins the 2026 World Cup, then he will become the only player with the MOST International Titles in football history. Currently, he shares the record (6) with Ángel Di María. 🇦🇷🤝🏼

👕🔟 Lionel Messi and his match worn shirt as a gift for Italian legend Roberto Baggio.

Nicole Ross From: Belarus | Model Blonde hair, striking blue eyes, and an effortlessly refined presence. A graceful style with timeless elegance that makes every photo stand out. Poised, polished, and undeniably captivating..

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This man stole a country from his own father and spent the next 18 years buying the West with gas money. - He deposed his own dad in a palace coup and left him in exile for nearly a decade - He founded the news network that aired Osama bin Laden's tapes - He built America's largest military base in the Middle East and charges no rent for it - He bought Harrods, the Shard, Canary Wharf, Paris Saint-Germain and 17% of Volkswagen - He won the 2022 World Cup for a country with no football history Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani died this morning at 74. Here's how bought the world: In June 1995, he waited for his father to leave the country, then took the throne. The coup was bloodless. His father spent nearly a decade in exile. Qatar is about one third the size of Belgium, and its population was barely two million, most of them foreign workers. But it was sitting on one of the LARGEST natural gas reserves on Earth. He bet everything on liquefied natural gas. Qatar became the world's biggest LNG exporter and one of the richest countries alive per person. Then he hit the problem every commodity business hits: Gas is gas, anyone with a tanker can sell it, and a tiny country with no army and that much money is a snack for its neighbours. So he bought two things nobody else in the Gulf thought to buy... The first was the world's attention. In 1996 he issued a decree and Al Jazeera was born. Within a few years it was the most influential news network in the Arab world. He owned the loudest microphone in the region and never had to speak into it himself. The second was the American military. In 1996, Qatar spent over a billion dollars building an air base at Al Udeid, outside Doha. It got the longest runway in the Gulf and shelters for nearly a hundred aircraft. Qatar's air force only had about a dozen fighter jets. In 1999 he reportedly told US officials he wanted 10,000 American servicemen stationed there permanently. Then 9/11 happened, and they came. The genius part: Al Udeid is now the forward headquarters of US Central Command and the largest American base in the Middle East, with roughly 10,000 troops. Qatar charges no rent. He built the asset before the customer existed, handed it over free, and bought the one thing cash cannot: The US military parked permanently between his gas and everyone who wanted it. The network broadcasting bin Laden and the runway flying America's war sat in the same tiny country, paid for by the same man. Then he went shopping... He set up the Qatar Investment Authority in 2005: - Harrods - The Shard - Canary Wharf, London's largest property owner, bought with Brookfield for 2.6 billion pounds - 17% of Volkswagen - Paris Saint-Germain All his. In 2017 the Telegraph ran the headline "Qataris own more of London than the Queen." Then 2008 arrived. Barclays needed billions or the British government was going to own it. Qatar wrote the cheque and its stake climbed to 12.7%. Barclays was later charged over how it disclosed that Qatari money. In 2010, FIFA handed the 2022 World Cup to a desert country with NO football history. Corruption allegations shadowed the bid for over a decade, and the treatment of the migrant workers who built it drew brutal criticism. Yet he walked into the opening match in 2022 and the stadium gave him a standing ovation. Every other Gulf state was selling the same molecule at the same price. Hamad spent his money on a newsroom, a runway, a football club and half of London. A country of two million now brokers hostage deals and hosts American presidents. He built all of it in 18 years, and he took the throne from his own father to start. Truly an unmatched legacy.

Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu can store its natural-grass pitch underground during concerts and other events. The field is divided into six massive movable trays. Each tray slides sideways into a storage shaft and is then lowered into the Hypogeum, a climate-controlled underground chamber equipped with grow lights, ventilation and irrigation. This system allows the stadium to switch from football mode to event mode in under five hours while keeping the grass protected below.

30 years. 12 films. One Name. CHRISTOPHER NOLAN.

🇨🇳 Where Does China Get Its Government Revenue From? China funds its government through several major revenue streams: 🏭 Value-added tax (VAT) 🏢 Corporate income tax 👤 Individual income tax 🛒 Consumption taxes 🚢 Customs duties & import taxes 🏠 Property and land-related revenue 🏦 State-owned enterprises 💰 Fees and other non-tax revenue

Very important read for Indians to get reality check and stop giving excuses for lagging behind. 🙏

Vikram M @Vvikramai

a day ago

Jensen Huang was asked how China built so many world-class AI companies in ten years. He didn't credit the government. He didn't say they stole it. He pointed at the culture. In China, it's "family first, friends second, and company third." So the whole system is open source

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🇹🇼 Ever look at an Apple Store in Taiwan from way up high? It really is a MacBook Pro... MAX. Pretty wild that they turned a building into a giant laptop. Writer: Daniyal

Thanks for such a precious article. 🙏

Ananth Rupanagudi @AnanthOnTrack

21 hours ago

An Indian scientist at Harvard discovered ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). Then he helped create the first chemotherapy drug and the first tetracycline antibiotic. Harvard still refused him tenure. A bowling alley would not let him bowl. He died at 53, without an obituary. His

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The rock at the bottom of that canyon is about 1.7 billion years old. The canyon itself is younger than 6 million years. So the stone is roughly 300 times older than the canyon that finally cut through and uncovered it. It looks ancient and permanent, but as rocks go, the Grand Canyon is a newborn. The Colorado River only started cutting this deep in the last 5 to 6 million years. Before that, it all just sat there, buried and flat. Look from the rim down to the river and you're reading time. Youngest rock on top, oldest at the bottom, layer on layer, because each one was laid down on the one before it. Drop your eyes from the edge to the water and you fall through nearly 2 billion years of Earth's history. The bottom layer, the dark, glittering Vishnu Schist, formed more than a third of the way back to when the planet itself formed. Then there's the part that puzzled geologists for over a hundred years. Low in the wall, two rock layers sit right on top of each other. The one on top is around 505 million years old. The one just beneath it is about 1.7 billion. Between two rocks you could cover with one hand, roughly 1.2 billion years of history is simply gone, worn away before the top layer ever formed. The National Park Service says it plainly: across these walls, more time is missing than is kept. Its size hides how it was made. The canyon runs a mile deep, 277 miles long, and up to 18 miles across, covering more ground than the state of Rhode Island. The river that carved it averages about 300 feet wide and 40 feet deep, moving at roughly 4 miles an hour, about walking speed. A river you could throw a stone across cut a mile straight down through solid rock, one grain of sand at a time. Close to 5 million people visit every year. From a plane window it looks like a scar across the desert. Up close it's a mile-deep cut through almost two billion years, made by a slow river in a geological blink.

Epic Maps 🗺️ @theepicmap

19 hours ago

Grand Canyon from Above

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⚽ 🇦🇷 Guillermo Stábile was the top scorer 🥇 at the inaugural 🏆 FIFA World Cup in 1930, finishing with an incredible ⚽ 8 goals in just four matches. 🌟 Although the official 🥇 Golden Boot (formerly the Golden Shoe) award did not exist at the time, Stábile is retrospectively recognized by FIFA as the tournament's first top scorer. 🇦🇷 Guillermo Stábile 🏆 Tournament: 1930 FIFA World Cup ⚽ Goals: 8 🥇 First FIFA World Cup Top Scorer

Texas froze its gas tax at 20 cents per gallon in 1991 and hasn't touched it in 35 years. Inflation ground that 20 cents down to about 7 cents of road-building power. The $18 toll on I-635 is where the other 13 cents went, with interest. The actual financing on that road: $2.6 billion total. TxDOT put in $490 million, about 18%. The rest was $672 million in private equity, an $850 million federal TIFIA loan, and $615 million in tax-exempt private activity bonds. The loans get repaid from tolls, so every driver who pays that sign is servicing $1.46 billion of debt. The concession runs 52 years. Cintra, a unit of Spain's Ferrovial, controls pricing on those lanes until 2061. And the detail almost nobody knows: the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System owns 10% of the equity. First US pension fund to ever buy directly into a road. A slice of that $18 flows into cops' retirement checks. The dynamic pricing has a contractual job. If average speeds in the managed lanes fall below 50 mph, the operator owes TxDOT penalties of 25 to 100 percent of tolls collected. That $18 is the contract defending its speed guarantee at rush hour. Price is the only knob it has. And Texans keep choosing this. Bills to raise or index the gas tax have died in every session for three decades. Indexing would cost the average driver roughly $70 a year. One peak round trip on those express lanes costs $36. Because a toll a private company charges never counts as a tax a politician raised.

Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes

a day ago

This is a toll road in Dallas, Texas The tolls are run on dynamic pricing. The tolls adjust every 5 minutes based on real-time traffic and congestion data Private equity firms got $490 million from taxpayers to build these toll lanes and the whole project cost about $2.6

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La Plata, Argentina, was planned from the ground up in 1882 as the new capital of Buenos Aires Province. Designed under urban planner Pedro Benoit, the city follows a strict grid crossed by diagonal avenues, with public squares placed at regular intervals. The result is the distinctive geometric pattern that earned La Plata its nickname: the “City of Diagonals.” 📸 @AnthonyQuigley