An Indian company that did not exist three years ago wants to build a rocket engine of a kind that has flown exactly once in history, on SpaceX's Starship.

Not even ISRO, that landed near Moon's south pole on a shoestring, has attempted it.

The company is called Astrobase. 🧵 The engine type Astrobase wants to build is called full-flow staged combustion — engineers call it the 'Everest of engine design'. The Soviets tried it in the 1960s and failed.

As of 2026, only seven such engines have ever been tested.

On 4 July, Modi stood in a Gujarat field and compared Sanand, a five-month-old chip hub, to Silicon Valley and Taiwan's Hsinchu.

It sounds like hubris, and for the first time, it isn't. 🧵 Silicon Valley took fifty years to become Silicon Valley, and Hsinchu took thirty.

Sanand has three plants that only package chips made somewhere else, the back end of the industry that Malaysia and Vietnam have done for decades without ever becoming Taiwan.

Where does the Ram Mandir donation theft case leave the debate around temple control?

The Ram Mandir is managed by an independent trust. Neither the Centre, nor the UP govt has a direct say in it. 🧵 Now that strong allegations of donation theft have emerged, does that weaken the case for keeping temples out of state control?

Not really.

Mismanagement, administrative lapses, even corruption cases have been reported from govt-managed as well as well 'free' temples.

In Nov. 1970, 348 MPs petitioned Indira Gandhi to delist converts to Christianity & Islam from the Scheduled Tribes list.

But the Bill lapsed as the Lok Sabha was dissolved within weeks.

The demand is back in 2026 with constitutional and judicial weight it did not have then.🧵 The 1963 Patna High Court ruling has been the wall against delisting ever since.

Examining an Oraon convert's case, the court found that converted Oraons continued to be treated as tribals by their community.

Christian Oraons, it said, are 'Oraons first and Christians next'.

Why would a politician refuse to sack a spokesperson who has offended multiple communities, embarrassed allies, triggered multiple FIRs, and caused resignations within his own party?

Because sometimes in politics arithmetic counts for more than outrage. 🧵 Rajkumar Bhati, a spokesperson of the Samajwadi Party, made remarks that angered Brahmins and later comments that upset both Jats and Gurjars.

The backlash came from rivals, allies, community groups, and even sections of his own party.

In 2021, Mukesh Ambani announced a 40 GWh cell gigafactory at Jamnagar, scaling to 100.

In May 2026, Reliance is back in talks with CATL — to buy finished cells and package them into Indian boxes, with press releases still calling it manufacturing. 🧵 Reliance is not alone. Exide's cells are licensed from SVOLT, Amara Raja's from Gotion and Highstar, Tata's Agratas from AESC — the Chinese-owned maker that has a board seat.

Every conglomerate that set out between 2021 and 2023 to build cells has retreated to assembling them.

India says it wants to become a deep-tech and manufacturing power. It has IITs, startups, research grants, and now even a ₹1 lakh crore innovation fund.

So why do so few Indian technologies become real products? 🧵 A big reason is that India’s research system splits innovation into separate worlds.

Universities do “research.”
Industry does “products.”

The difficult middle — turning a lab prototype into a usable technology — belongs to nobody.

A major Indian OEM donated engines to a university lab.

No specs, no joint team, no embedded engineer for integration. Just hardware tossed over to the lab. That's industry-academia "collaboration" in India.

Here's why it is that way. 🧵 India follows NASA's TRL system — a 9-level readiness scale.

Academia owns TRL 1–3.
Industry owns TRL 7–9.

And the middle 4–6? That is nobody's job. That middle is where ideas go to die.

In Bengaluru, a man spent three months and 25 visits trying to get his eKhata.

After multiple rejections, the ARO finally told him in Kannada, 'give something.' He refused.

By then his exhausted father had quietly paid ₹90,000 to an agent. The eKhata had not arrived. 🧵 On a ₹5 crore property deal in India, the state collects roughly 5.68% in stamp duty and registration charges.

All it gives back is a record that the transaction happened. It does not confirm that the seller had the right to sell or that the buyer is safe from later claims.

One woman cleaned floors for Rs 4,500/month. The other stitched leaf plates in a forest village to survive.

On 4 May 2026, both won seats in the West Bengal Assembly — by margins of 12,000 and 32,000 votes.

This is what actually happened. 🧵 Neither had money, land, or a political family.

What they had: years of going door to door, on bicycles, in constituencies where backing the wrong party could get you hurt.

They built their base the slow way. The unglamorous way.

In 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Congress won 206 seats — a 61-seat jump from 2004.

Analysts credited MNREGA, the nuclear deal, etc.

What no one pointed out was the new electoral map 🧵 India's constituencies were redrawn in 2008 — the first full delimitation since 1973.

The 2009 election was the first fought on that new map.

SC reservations were rotated, vote-banks dissolved, new seats created in 'Congress-friendly' belts.

Two MBA graduates tried to export one container of rice. The government portal asked them to re-upload a document. There was no field to do it.

The workaround was an email address listed nowhere on the site. Without knowing someone, their first export would have died there. 🧵 Parliament just decriminalised 717 provisions across 79 laws. The Jan Vishwas Bill removes the jail threat that gave inspectors leverage over small businesses for decades.

Significant reform. But it only touches Central laws, roughly a third of an MSME's compliance burden.

In 2012, a UK MP leaned across a committee table at Amazon, Starbucks, Google executives and said, "We are not accusing you of being illegal. We are accusing you of being immoral."

This MP never drafted any law but effected a change in global tax laws.

What do MPs really do?🧵 The defeat of Delimitation Bill gives an opportunity to step back — what do MPs actually do?

A loud argument against expansion is that Indian MPs are rubber stamps anyway. Whip ties their hands, Parliament is theatre, 850 is just more of the same.

That's not the whole truth.

In 2023, DRDO posted photos from the control station of India's TAPAS drone programme.

On the ceiling, pointed at screens showing flight telemetry, was a CCTV by Hikvision, a company partly owned by China's state defence-electronics group.

The camera was just a symptom. 🧵 The CCTV had a vulnerability rated 9.8/10 by US cybersecurity authorities.

A remote attacker can bypass authentication, gain full control, view live feeds, and extract credentials.

This was first disclosed in 2017. Active exploitation was confirmed, after 9 years, in 2026.

Most analyses of' Bengal 2026' start with 'Muslim vote consolidation'.

The claim: minority community decides 80–120 of 294 assembly seats.

The data tells a different story. 🧵 Muslim community is 27% of Bengal's population — but a majority in just 3 of 23 districts.

Outside that northern belt, concentrations are real but scattered.

Most fall short of what it takes to be independently decisive under a first-past-the-post system.

#WestBengal | In 1960-61, West Bengal ranked third among Indian states by per capita income, behind only Punjab and Maharashtra. By 2023-24, it had fallen to twenty-fourth. 🧵 A big part of why: factories. Between 1977 and 2011, West Bengal's registered factories grew 64%. Tamil Nadu's grew 233%. Gujarat's grew 135%. These aren't marginal differences.

In the 1985 Tamil classic 'Sindhu Bhairavi', the female lead challenges a Telugu kriti singer: "What's the point if the listener can't understand?"

That scene accidentally reinforced a myth — that Carnatic music must choose a language. 🧵 It never did. Carnatic music's story is not one language conquering another. It's a tradition that made peace with every tongue it touched — Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada.

Each found a home in the music, and the music found a home in each.

In mid-2024, a spacecraft — widely understood to be Chinese — reportedly manoeuvred to within one kilometre of an Indian satellite in Low Earth Orbit.🧵 Five years earlier, India had demonstrated it could destroy a satellite in orbit.

Mission Shakti, March 2019. A modified ballistic missile interceptor slammed into a target satellite at 10 km/s.
The satellite ceased to exist.

China took note, but it was not deterred.

On 23 March, two tunnel boring machines — each weighing over 2,000 tonnes, each wider than a four-lane highway — were unloaded at Mumbai's JNPT port.

They were meant to arrive in October 2024.

This thread, and the accompanying story, is about what held them up.

📷 The machines are destined for India's first bullet train corridor - specifically its most difficult segment: a 21-kilometre underground stretch beneath Mumbai, including a seven-kilometre passage under Thane Creek.

The geology is mixed. The depth ranges from 25 to 65 metres. No machine built in India could do this job. It had to be imported from China.

Beijing controls 94% of the world's sintered permanent magnets. 91% of global rare earth refining. 81% of relevant patents filed in the last decade.

This isn't market dominance. It's a chokehold.

And India just made its boldest move to break free.🧵 On March 20, India's Ministry of Heavy Industries posted a tender that could reshape the country's industrial future.

₹7,280 crore. 6,000 metric tonnes of sintered NdFeB magnet capacity. Up to 5 private manufacturers. Bids due May 28.

Here's how the money is structured 👇

Several years ago, engineers at a major Indian OEM wanted to add a simple valve to their own engine.

They knew how to do it. The problem: the software running inside their own vehicle's ECU was locked. The key was in Germany.

Three years later, the problem remained unsolved. 🧵 Every Indian passenger car — Tata, Mahindra, Maruti, every one — has its electronic brain designed and controlled by a foreign company.

India produces over 5 million passenger vehicles a year. It designs the ECU for zero of them.

This is not a company-specific failing. It is the defining condition of the industry.