Engineering students who visit Shivanasamudra hydroelectric plant are never told the significance of that plant and how India taught the world the long-distance transmission of electricity! It is this plant which made the steam power obsolete!

This is to fix that gap in the knowledge. I wish I had been made aware of this in 1991 when I visited the site as an Engineering student.

In June 1902, something occurred at a remote Indian waterfall that should have shocked the Western world. A transmission line, 92 miles long, carried 30,000 volts of electrical current through the jungle from Shivanasamudra Falls to the Kolar Gold Fields. It was the longest commercial high-voltage power line on Earth.

Nothing comparable existed in America or Europe.

The achievement emerged from the vision of K. Seshadri Iyer, Dewan of Mysore, and Major Alain Chartier Joly de Lotbiniere, a Canadian engineer in the Hindu kingdom's service. De Lotbiniere saw something others had missed: the Cauvery River's 400-foot drop could turn turbines and generate power sufficient to replace steam engines at Kolar's deep mines, where fuel costs had become prohibitive.

Seshadri Iyer understood that a kingdom's survival depended on economic capacity, not military might alone. In 1898, he commissioned engineers to travel to Niagara Falls to study George Westinghouse's alternating current transmission system. When they returned, the plan crystallized. Mysore would not simply purchase foreign solutions. It would understand every component and build the system itself.

The venture carried substantial risk. The capital was considerable for the 1890s. The technology was unproven. The line would stretch across malaria-infested terrain, requiring 5,000 laborers. The court skeptics outnumbered believers. Yet Seshadri Iyer proceeded with methodical confidence.

Construction began in 1899. Generators came from General Electric in America. Turbines came from Escher Wyss in Switzerland. But the transmission system design and execution remained under Indian leadership. Civil engineers designed channels to divert the Cauvery's flow through penstocks. Electrical engineers stepped voltage upward to 30,000-35,000 volts using transformers, transmitted it across 92 miles of copper line, then stepped it downward at Kolar for mining machinery.

The frequency selected was 25 cycles per second, not arbitrary but deliberate. Heavy rotary converters used in mining operated efficiently at lower frequencies than the 50 or 60 hertz that would eventually become standard globally. This reflected sophisticated understanding of end-user requirements.

In June 1902, high-voltage power generated at Shivanasamudra flowed across 147 kilometers to the gold fields. For the first time, machines in one location could be powered by water falling in a completely separate location, separated by jungles and hills. The mining operations transformed. Deep extraction became economically viable. Steam dependence was broken.

This distinction matters. The Shivanasamudra project was not Western technology imposed on an Indian kingdom. It was an Indian administration studying Niagara Falls, acquiring knowledge, and implementing a solution that exceeded what any Western nation had accomplished in this specific domain. Technologies were sourced globally. Vision and execution were profoundly local.

The surplus power enabled Bangalore to become Asia's first city with meaningful electric street lighting in 1905. Nearly 100 streetlights appeared suddenly, not from gradual urban accumulation of infrastructure, but from a distant river harnessed with precision. Within a year, Bangalore had 861 streetlights and 1,639 domestic connections.

The Shivanasamudra project reveals patterns that extend beyond technical accomplishment. It demonstrates that innovation does not flow exclusively from wealthy Western nations. A kingdom positioned as subordinate within the British Indian Empire could perceive a technological opportunity, acquire knowledge globally, and implement a solution exceeding established industrial powers. It shows that engineering excellence is not the monopoly of any nation or culture. And it illustrates what becomes possible when vision, resources, and technical competence align in common purpose.

The subsequent obscuring of credit should not overshadow the original achievement. The Hindu kingdom of Mysore, through Seshadri Iyer's leadership and de Lotbiniere's engineering, seized a technological frontier and transformed the region's future. That accomplishment deserves recognition as evidence of what is possible when aspiration meets capability. @grok check kar lena.

Without these twelve Hindu textbooks copied by Arabs, Math as we know today would not exist.

Mythbusting that Bhakthi movement was from poor Hindus. (10 panel comic)

This visual narrative powerfully refutes the oversimplified characterization of Bhakti as merely a "religion of the poor," revealing instead a sophisticated movement led by some of medieval India's most privileged and educated individuals. Purandara Dasa (1484-1564) was originally known as Srinivasa Nayaka, earning the title "Navakoti Narayana" for his immense wealth worth ninety million. Born into a prosperous diamond merchant family in Karnataka, his transformation from affluent trader to devotional composer demonstrates that Bhakti attracted those who had achieved material success yet sought spiritual fulfillment.

How India gave every medicine it knew to Europe in 1675!

Indian Physicians laid foundation for evidence base medicine as we know it today!

🧵

India paid 7.4 lakh crores rupees to fund Britain's WW2.
India carried Britain on her shoulders.
🧵 By 1945, India had accumulated £1.32 billion in sterling balances—approximately $5.28 billion at the 1945 exchange rate, which represents about $84 billion in today's purchasing power. Almost close to 7.4 lakh crore Rupees!

Almagest pushed by the Church is not original.

See how the table gets fudged. Red is Greek residuals

Blue is corresponding residuals in the Latin translations.

Full article in the thread. When Ptolemy Lost His Footing: The Almagest, Western Claims, and the Forgotten Indian Source
For centuries, the West has built the legend of its scientific awakening on a single towering narrative: ancient Greece, cradle of rational thought, handed its wisdom to Rome, which the Church preserved through turmoil, from which it was triumphantly revived in Renaissance Europe. Perhaps nowhere is this story more prominent than in astronomy, with the Almagest, supposedly translated from Greek originals, serving as the crown jewel of this heritage. Yet recent scholarship and the testimony of medieval manuscripts reveal a different and far more complicated truth.

How Bhaskara I's beautiful solution has outlast empires!

Get amazed.

Bhaskara I in 7th century derived this formula to calculate Sine of any angle between 0 and 180 degrees Bhaskara I’s formula is one of the earliest and most elegant curve-fitting approximations for the sine function.

When Galileo was wrong and Pope was right!

Fascinating back story on the title which both @grok and @AskPerplexity failed to capture.

In 1630, Galileo brought his manuscript to Rome, seeking approval from the Church. He submitted it to Father Niccolò Riccardi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, who served as the official Roman censor responsible for granting permission for the publication of works in the Papal States. Riccardi was known for his affable manner, literary interests, and considerable appetite, earning him the nickname “Father Monster” (“Padre Mostro”) in Roman social circles, a reference to his great size rather than any severity in character. He was not himself a scientist, being primarily a poet and theologian, and thus depended on scientific advisers for assessing the content of Galileo’s ambitious treatise. At the same time, Galileo enjoyed the steadfast support of Francesco Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador to Rome, and his wife. The Niccolinis were close friends of Galileo and stood in good stead with the papal court. Their considerable social influence and personal charm were well known, and contemporary reports describe their tactful ability to press Riccardi and exercise diplomatic leverage. Through their efforts, they pursued a quick and favorable decision from the censors for Galileo’s work.

The Sacred Mathematics: How Aryabhata and the Brahma School Unified India's Mathematical Heritage
The opening verse of the Aryabhatiya, composed in 499 CE, begins with a Sanskrit invocation that would echo through the corridors of Indian mathematical thought for over a millennium: "प्रणिपत्यैकमनेकं के सयां देवर्ता परं ब्रह्म" - "I bow to the one divine, the supreme Brahma." This was not merely ceremonial flourish. In these words, the young mathematician Aryabhata established what would become the most enduring intellectual lineage in the history of Indian mathematics - a tradition that would link every subsequent mathematical breakthrough on the subcontinent to a single, sacred source.

What emerges from careful examination of India's mathematical manuscripts is a remarkable story of intellectual continuity. From the medieval courts of Karnataka to the temple schools of Kerala, from the observatories of Ujjain to the universities of Bengal, every significant mathematical development can be traced back to commentaries on, elaborations of, or direct engagement with Aryabhata's foundational work. The Aryabhatiya was not merely a mathematical text; it was the document of an entire civilization's approach to quantitative thought, and its influence created what historical sources refer to as the "Brahma School of Mathematics" - a unifying framework that would define Indian mathematical culture for centuries. The Sacred Foundation of Mathematical Knowledge
The relationship between mathematics and divinity in ancient India was far more intimate than modern scholarship often acknowledges. When Aryabhata dedicated his work to Brahma, he was establishing more than religious reverence; he was asserting the divine origin of mathematical knowledge itself. According to the guru-parampara tradition that governs Indian intellectual lineages, Aryabhata's invocation represented his claim that all mathematical truth emanated from Brahma, the cosmic creator. This was not metaphor - it was epistemology.

The manuscripts tell us that Aryabhata's contemporaries and successors took this claim seriously. Bhaskara I, writing his commentary on the Aryabhatiya in 629 CE, explicitly acknowledged this lineage. Later mathematicians like Brahmagupta, despite their occasional criticisms of Aryabhata's specific conclusions, maintained the fundamental framework established in the Aryabhatiya. Even when they disagreed with particular calculations - as Brahmagupta did regarding the Earth's rotation - they operated within the conceptual universe that Aryabhata had created.

This devotional aspect of Indian mathematics was not incidental but structural. The tradition of beginning mathematical texts with invocations, of organizing knowledge through verse rather than prose, and of maintaining strict guru-disciple relationships in the transmission of mathematical knowledge all served to preserve and propagate a unified approach to mathematical thinking. The Aryabhatiya's influence was not merely technical but cultural, creating a shared mathematical consciousness that would persist across regions, languages, and centuries.

प्रणिपत्यैकमनेकं के सयां देवर्ता परं ब्रह्म.
This is the very first line of Indian Mathematics.
This line is an invocation, where Āryabhaṭa offers obeisance. The very first line in Aryabhatiya! This is an invocation to Brahma whom Aryabhata considered as Guru. It is said that Aryabhata meditated and found all the knowledge from Brahma the creator of Mathematics.

Newton denies his role in Newton's law! This will come as a surprise to most of you. However, I have verified it from primary sources.
Newton's second law has a flaw.
It is not Newton's!!

Do you know origin of sine and cosine? Indian mathematicians, from Āryabhaṭa in the 6th century CE to the authors of the Surya Siddhanta, had a vivid word for what we now call the sine: jya (“chord” or “bowstring”), describing the half-chord of a circle corresponding to an arc. When astronomers wanted the perpendicular complement, they used kotijya (“perpendicular chord”), effectively the modern cosine.

These terms were never obscure: they were central to the calculation of eclipses, planetary motion, and the entire toolkit of Indian astronomy. As Sanskrit texts made their way west, their concepts captured the imaginations of scholars everywhere.

@ASIGoI messed it up again. Read the complete thread @asigoi please mention that structure was not built primarily as mosque.

Check the layout of the property that shows that it was not built primarily as a mosque.

When Gods Crossed Borders: The Remarkable Discovery of Vedic Deities in Ancient Syria

How a 3,400-year-old treaty found in Turkey rewrote our understanding of Bronze Age cultural exchange

I. The Accidental Discovery That Changed History
In the spring of 1906, Hugo Winckler was growing frustrated. The German archaeologist had come to the barren hills of central Turkey expecting to uncover Assyrian ruins, but what he found instead seemed to make no sense. The cuneiform tablets emerging from the ancient mound at Bogazköy bore inscriptions in an unknown language, filled with references to peoples and places that didn't appear in any historical record. Local villagers had been using the scattered clay fragments to build walls and repair roads, unaware they were destroying one of archaeology's greatest treasures.

What Winckler had stumbled upon was Hattusa, the lost capital of the Hittite Empire—a Bronze Age superpower that had once ruled from the Black Sea to the borders of Egypt. Over the course of several excavation seasons, his team would unearth more than 25,000 cuneiform tablets, transforming our understanding of the ancient Near East. Among these was a diplomatic archive that revealed the Hittites as masterful negotiators who had corresponded with pharaohs, traded with Mycenaean Greeks, and forged alliances across the known world.

But the most startling discovery lay buried in the fragments of a peace treaty dating to around 1380 BCE. As scholars painstakingly pieced together the broken tablets and began to decipher their contents, they found something that should have been impossible: the names of gods from the Indian subcontinent, invoked as divine witnesses in a diplomatic agreement between two ancient Near Eastern kingdoms. The implications would ripple through academia for generations, challenging everything historians thought they knew about the boundaries between civilizations. II. The Treaty That Shouldn't Exist
The peace treaty between Hittite King Suppiluliuma I and the Mitanni ruler Shattiwaza reads like a standard Bronze Age diplomatic document—until it reaches the list of divine witnesses. Alongside the expected Hittite storm gods and Hurrian deities, the text invokes "Mitra-shil, Uruwana-shil, Indar, and Nashatianna." To anyone familiar with Sanskrit literature, these names were unmistakable: Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatyas—core deities of the Rig Veda, Hinduism's oldest and most sacred text.

The discovery sent shockwaves through the scholarly world. Here was concrete evidence that Vedic religious concepts had somehow traveled thousands of miles from their presumed homeland in India to the courts of ancient Syria and Turkey. The treaty wasn't just a diplomatic curiosity; it was proof that the ancient world was far more interconnected than anyone had imagined. Trade routes and migration patterns that archaeologists had only theorized about suddenly became tangible, written in cuneiform on clay tablets that had survived nearly three and a half millennia.

The political context made the religious implications even more intriguing. The Mitanni kingdom, which controlled territory across northern Syria and southeastern Turkey, was ruled by an Indo-Aryan elite governing a predominantly Hurrian population. Their kings bore Sanskrit names, their warriors were called by the Sanskrit term "marya" (young warrior), and their horse-training manuals contained Sanskrit numerical terms. The treaty revealed a Bronze Age world where cultural and religious ideas flowed freely across continents, carried by traders, diplomats, and migrating peoples who thought nothing of the boundaries that would later divide East from West.

Rivers talked to us and told us their names!

A 🧵 I have already explained. This is picture book for easy reference.

Out of more than 36 ports documented in the Periplus, about 26 are in India!

The names are vivid, and their trade specialties meticulously noted—black pepper, pearls, cotton, ivory, steel, silk, and gold. The inland riverine corridors and the monsoon cycles are described with the familiarity of someone who has not only visited but traded here for years. India was not a destination—it was the marketplace of the ancient world.

Colonial textbooks taught generations of Indians a lie: that Europe discovered the oceans, that Vasco da Gama “opened” the sea to India, that Indian sailors hugged coasts while European mariners cut across oceans.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written over a thousand years before Da Gama, debunks this narrative with clinical precision. The author, an Egyptian-Greek merchant, describes in detail the ports, products, and practices of Indian maritime trade. Crucially, the text doesn't present India as a destination, but as the center of the Indian Ocean world.

The real cartographic scandal is how this was hidden. Indian ports like Chaul, Sopara, Calliena, and Tyndis are shown in the Periplus as part of a continuous, dynamic maritime network. The document even lists the inland logistics—from the gold mines of the south to the Narmada riverine corridor—suggesting an integrated knowledge of trade geography.

Yet modern maps and school curricula omit these details. This is not innocent ignorance—it is epistemic violence.

To bring the focus back on India, I have meticulously researched all the placed mentioned in the book and put them on the map with description provided.

I have put them on a modern map so that every one can see out of 36 ports mentioned, 26 are in Bharat!

As usual code is open source at the link already shared with other mapping.

This is my way of providing justice to the epistemic violence.

🧵 I. African and Arabian Ports (West of India)
These were staging points for voyages toward India.

Myos Hormos – Red Sea port of Egypt (launch point)

Berenike – Another major Egyptian Red Sea port

Malao – Present-day Berbera, Somalia

Mundus – Near present-day Mogadishu

Opone – Hafun Peninsula, Somalia

Aromata – Cape Guardafui

Muza – Port in Yemen

Okelis – Yemen

Aden (Eudaemon Arabia) – Important port near the Gulf of Aden

Cana – Arabian port used by Himyarite Kingdom

Fixing Vasco da Gama.

Vasco da Gama departed Lisbon in 1497 on his quest to find a sea route to India, he relied heavily on local knowledge once he entered the Indian Ocean. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sailing up the East African coast, he arrived at Melinde (modern Malindi, Kenya) in April 1498. There, according to multiple sources:

The local Muslim Sheikh provided him with a seasoned Gujarati navigator familiar with monsoon winds and Indian Ocean currents.

#SecretHistory of how India took down Pakistan's low value drones at penny like costs! Or 1/10,000th the cost of traditional interceptors! This is mind blowing! #StarWars India used Direct Energy Weapons!

What happened to Gorkhas is an eye opener!
Never trust the British! The Forgotten Warriors of Empire: How Britain Took the 10th Gorkha Rifles for a Ride!

Fun fact:
Britain never claims they build rail roads in China.

Even though they built major lines like Beijing-Hankou, Tianjin-Shandong, and others.

Why?

🧵 Railways in China in 19th and early 20th century were mostly funded through foreign loans, often under exploitative terms.

India was stripped off its revenues for next 45 years!

On August 14, 1947!

And when country didn't prosper they blamed "Hindu rate of growth"

Laying it all bare, with primary evidence.
🧵 1. Do you see a figure of 1.16 Billion Pounds being stripped from RBI which had to open account with Bank of England!