Nothing is ever entirely abstract; there's always a hidden or apparent form of something tucked away, a resemblance, perhaps a concealed figure in the carpet. Thread. Is something hidden in this panel (by Michelangelo) from the Sistine Chapel? It’s called The Separation of Light from Darkness.

Greek children in schools are nurtured on a story to teach them to love their glorious cultural inheritance. It's a story that goes back to the Greek War of Independence (against the ruling Ottomans that led to the foundation of modern Greece). In March 1821, Athens was retaken by the Greek forces. The only Turkish garrison that remained fled to the Acropolis (the grand and ancient citadel above Athens) with a bunch of Greek hostages. The Acropolis was soon surrounded and besieged by Greek revolutionary forces.

Neoteny aka cuteness aka survival of the needy. Thread. With beasts and feral creatures, one would expect the weak in body and mind to be extinguished. There is a possible exception. Neoteny. And it’s something of an evolutionary confidence trick.

This is the imperishable story of the most exclusive private social club in the world. So prohibitive was its membership fee, so severely inflexible and exacting the terms of membership, that through the span of its existence, it had just 649 members.

Consider, for a moment, the audacious and gnomic cleverness of the life cycle of microscopic pathogens. Toxoplasma gondii, for instance, a protozoan parasite, can infect any warm-blooded vertebrate, but requires specifically the intestines of a cat to reproduce sexually and produce the oocyst, the infectious agent.

“Now, you’ve got an aneurysm in there as big as a grapefruit, and it’s about ready to burst. But you’re a strong boy, and I’m the best surgeon in the world, so if this had to happen, we’ve got the best possible odds.” That’s how Denton Cooley would respond to the quivering pleas of someone with an aneurysm of the thoracic aorta.

Here is Homi Bhabha, the aesthete, all of twenty-five (in 1934), writing from Cambridge to a lady friend:
“Since I cannot increase the content of life by increasing its duration, I will increase it by increasing its intensity.” “Art, music, poetry, and everything else that I do will have one purpose—increasing the intensity of my consciousness and life.”
He wrote this soon after getting his PhD in nuclear physics. He was then at the vanguard of the quantum revolution.

What does it take for a certain turn of phrase to unwittingly live through us? Thread. By common consensus, the greatest and the most perfectly formed work of English prose ever written was produced by a committee of fifty-four people over four hundred years ago.

How the man on the left saved the man on the right with cellophane. Thread. This is Rudolph Nissen. When Ferdinand Sauerbruch, a pioneer in chest surgery, was named chair of surgery at the Charité in Berlin in 1927, he took along Nissen, his most eager and earnest protégé.

The Ganga Ram hospital vaccine effectiveness study (during the Delta surge in Delhi). @SatwikRuma is the lead author. Salient findings: Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is a tertiary care private hospital in New Delhi, having 4296 employees with equitable access to medical benefits, including investigations, medicines and hospitalisation.

Images of the romantic disease. A fungal ball in a tubercular cavity. The cannonball hole is where the Mycobacteria ate the lung and the airway. The fungus Aspergillus lives in it now. This 36-year-old male came to the casualty coughing out blood incontinently. The bleeding vessels were embolized with a microcatheter. Now stable. Just leaden-eyed and fearful of daytime nightmares.

"How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews"
"Not odd / Of God / The Goyim / Annoy 'im"

Was the Jewish state possible in East Africa? Thread. Before all of this, in the beginning, at the first World Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1897, when a bunch of Jews declared that they were a nation in need of a State or, more correctly, in need of real estate for a state, they did so in swallow-tailed coats and white ties.

This is a clickbait image. Parveen Babi had been deceased for nearly forty-eight hours before she was found in her Juhu apartment. The small squad from the local police station that broke open her door probably recoiled from the sour, spiced smell of decaying flesh inside the apartment. It was the smell of gangrene.

Thread on Coronil. What has been published is a small pilot study of 100 patients (all asymptomatic), wherein roughly half of them received Coronil. They looked for the time taken to test negative and the levels of inflammatory markers.

https://twitter.com/DILIPtheCHERIAN/status/1364429018318073856

It is inappropriate to make any triumphant claims based on the results of such a small pilot study. At best one could say that there is proof of concept and this looks promising enough to make preparations for a larger, proper study and external validation.

On the pernicious morality of the Kumbh mela. Thread. The world’s largest act of faith or mass hysteria involved 50 million credulous humans commemorating an ancient practice. They descended on the flood plains of a river on 4th Feb 2019 and bathed in it to expiate the sins they might have committed in this life or a previous one.

Is the cow a person or a thing? Or a sentient non-person?On Bos indicus and her lactational secretions. Thread. Kharwas, a pudding made from the colostrum of cows, is or should be, a nation-defining artefact.

On Thomas Paine's bones and what happened in Mahad (Maharashtra) in 1927. Thread. The most reviled man in early 19th century America (because he wrote The Age of Reason) died a pauper in the worst kind of squalor, his body covered in cankers. Denied burial at the Quaker burying ground, he was buried in the orchard of his home in New Rochelle, New York State.

Thread. There aren’t just elective affinities between Sanatan Dharma and capitalism, it prefigures capitalism. Not only is it perfectly acceptable to pray for money, there’s a designated treasurer (Kuber), a protector of wealth (Manibhadra) and a Goddess (Lakshmi) to properly propitiate. She sits on a thousand petalled lotus, her body is golden coloured.

Thread. "The Humanities make us humane," declared the celebrated Parsi physician to his audience, almost entailing that conclusion upon us. Then he paused for effect, his incredibly ruddy cheeks and well burnished Parsi nose precipitously poised on the edge of his rhetoric. He was a professor holding himself in readiness for his lecture, looking like the sun daily lit out of his bottom. It was one of those supremely well-attended orations at the India International Centre. The Parsi’s proposition: A Study of the Humanities Makes a Better Physician

Thread. Udta Freud and the surgical campaigns of cocaine hydrochloride. "Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red. And if you’re forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body," wrote Sigmund Freud, in 1884, to Martha, his affianced beloved.

Thread. The only mentionable alumnus of my alma mater, Government Medical College, Miraj (Sangli district, Maharashtra) was shot once in the head, twice in the chest, both obviously his peccant parts. On the kerb of Omkareshwar bridge near Shanivar Peth, Pune, 20 Aug 2013. He was found there bent over slightly, prostrate, quiet, like a sleeping beggar, not like someone who had floundered and flailed before his last guttering splutters, ruched red blood spreading under him. Punished publicly for teaching children the seaminess of miracles.