What caught my attention recently.. #6
March 29, 2025
March Madness & IPL, benefits of Yoga, architects of the digital era & Modi’s interview with Lex Fridman.
March Madness & IPL
It is March Madness (college basketball championships) time in America and IPL (league cricket) time in India. My daughter is an avid follower of the former and my wife of the latter. My son isn’t that interested but keeps up with March Madness as he does with most things his elder sister is into. And although I don’t care much about the IPL, I keep up with it as a long-time cricket fan and since it is so hard to escape for a person of Indian origin.
Watching my daughter and wife’s excitement made me wonder recently if college / amateur cricket could be the next big sporting commercial enterprise in India, like college basketball & football are in America. Will there be someone who will Americanize school / college level amateur cricket in India like Lalit Modi did with T20 cricket?
Benefits of Yoga
I have been reading a couple of books on Yoga to deepen my understanding of the philosophy and practice. In the process, I am also learning about the various subtle benefits of Yoga, beyond the more commonly known ones like improving flexibility, breathing, calming the mind, etc. As just one example, it turns out that the quality of our breathing has a powerful effect on the health of our abdominal organs. Conversely, the health of our abdominal region influences the quality of our breathing. The different elements of Yoga like Asana and Pranayama work in tandem to improve the health of not just our external body and breath but of the entire system including our internal organs. All of this deeply resonates with my own experience of significant improvements to my overall health since I started practicing Yoga over a decade ago. I plan to write more about this sometime later.
Who knew that the Brits were the ones that ushered in the Digital era?
I recently read a book titled ‘Geniuses at war’. It is a fascinating story of how the successful decoding of Nazi war plans by some brilliant British engineers including the famous Turing, was as instrumental in ending the 2nd world war as the Americans dropping atom bombs on Japan. The book describes how the Brits under Churchill’s sponsorship created an agile, meritocratic, egalitarian ecosystem at Bletchley Park outside London for this operation. The tremendous computing advances Turing and team made at Bletchley Park culminating in the development of the ‘Colossus’ (the world's first programmable digital electronic computer), not only helped end the war but also ushered in the digital age! Although for a very brief period, it turns out that Bletchley Park was the OG Silicon Valley!
Narendra Modi’s interview with Lex Fridman
American podcaster Lex Fridman was in India recently and did a 3 hour interview with Modi! It was long but provided some great insights into Modi’s worldview, life, philosophy and leadership style. And the mixed language version (questions in English – answers in Hindi) was flawlessly done and made the conversation a lot more effective. A link to Lex’s tweet about this including the full video as well as timestamps of key topics discussed is included below. If you haven’t already, it would be worthwhile checking it out given the state of the world we live in and the importance of India and in turn Modi.