Notes of Nagesh

By  Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan ♦️India's Twin Mass Movements, Born A Year Apart, Show How Religious Revivalism Can Take Very Different Routes To Influence. ♦️What a Century of Unregistered Mass Movements Reveals About Accountability in South Asia In 1925, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, a doctor named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar gathered a handful of young men for callisthenics, drills and discussions of Hindu civilisation. A year later and a few hundred miles north, in the dusty Mewat region, a cleric named Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi began urging lapsed Muslims to relearn the basics of their faith. Neither man could have predicted that his small initiative would grow into one of the world's largest religious or cultural movements. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Tablighi Jamaat now claim, by some estimates, tens of millions of adherents between them, the RSS concentrated in India and the Tablighi Jamaat spread across some 150 countries. Comparing them is a useful ...

Peter Thiel's flight to Argentina is really a hedge, not an exit ANY visitor to Barrio Parque, the hushed embassy district of Buenos Aires where ambassadors and old cattle money have long kept their townhouses, will now find a new neighbour. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, an early backer of Facebook and one of the Republican Party's most generous donors, has paid around $12m for a 17,200-square-foot mansion designed by Alejandro Bustillo, the architect behind some of Argentina's grandest 20th-century buildings. His children have been enrolled in local schools. His husband has relocated with him. President Javier Milei has hosted him at the Casa Rosada, and Mr Thiel has held separate meetings with the economy minister and the deregulation minister. Naturally, this has been read as a billionaire's flight from America. It is nothing of the sort. While Mr Thiel's body has moved south, his money has stayed resolutely north. In the same quarter that...

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan  The Secret War of Minds During the height of World War II, a different kind of combat was being waged far from the front lines of heavy artillery. This was the war of "morale operations," led by the  Office of Strategic Services (OSS) —the organization that would eventually become the modern-day CIA. The OSS was the brainchild of  General William "Wild Bill" Donovan , a fascinating leader who believed that unconventional tactics were just as vital as physical weapons. Donovan’s core philosophy was that subtly planned rumor and subversion could be more effective at winning a conflict than a "shooting war." The mission of the  Morale Operations (MO)  branch was to systematically break the spirit of the enemy. Rather than destroying tanks, the MO branch aimed to dismantle the enemy's will to fight by seeding doubt, fear, and exhaustion within their ranks and civilian populations through the weaponization of information. Donova...

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan For more than two thousand years, a single mathematical text has survived wars, the burning of libraries, the collapse of empires, and the complete reinvention of mathematics itself. Euclid's Elements , composed in Alexandria around 300 BCE, remains one of the most reprinted, translated, and studied books in human history — outpaced in editions, by some estimates, only by the Bible. Yet today, no working mathematician needs the Elements  (  https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/Books/Euclid/Elements.pdf  ) to learn geometry. Modern textbooks present the same theorems more efficiently, with better notation and clearer diagrams. So why does this ancient text still command a devoted readership of students, scientists, and curious minds nearly twenty-four centuries after it was written? The answer has little to do with geometry itself, and everything to do with a method. The Masterclass in Axiomatic-Deductive Reasoning The Elements is not, at its heart,...

Chuppala NAgesh Bhushan Inspired by Stephen Petro's lecture   A 2,300-year-old textbook on triangles turns out to be one of history's best courses in clear thinking IT IS a strange fact of intellectual history that one of the most reliable ways to sharpen the mind has nothing to do with case studies, leadership retreats or business-school frameworks. It is a geometry book. Written around 300BC by a mathematician in Alexandria, Euclid's "Elements" set out to prove facts about points, lines and triangles. But across the centuries it has quietly done something else: it has taught some of history's sharpest minds how to think. Four examples make the case. Abraham Lincoln came to Euclid out of professional frustration. Self-taught and largely unschooled, he found that he kept losing arguments he ought to have won—not because his facts were wrong, but because he could not properly demonstrate his claims. So he retreated to his father's farm and did not re...