Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.~ Diane Ackerman.
Mumbai, India
Joined April 2020
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Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Fellow doctors - especially those just graduating or preparing for NEET. I want to share a longish post.
We recently had a batch reunion. A decade ago, our medical college batch conversations were a high-stakes highlight reel: which competitive post-graduation specialty did you crack, your rank, USMLE fellowship matches. We were defined entirely by our professional milestones.
When our batch met recently, the vibe had completely shifted. Not a single person talked about their number of publications, the bed strength of their hospital, or how state-of-the-art their clinic setup is. Instead, we spent hours talking about our kids, navigating aging parents, our creative outlets, and what actually brings us a sense of purpose beyond the clinic doors.
It made me reflect on the predictable arc of these milestones. Fast forward another decade, and I am certain our catch-ups will center around chronic health management, joint pains, and our children heading off to college. In fact, a few months ago, I watched my mother-in-lawโs batch reunite and their entire evening revolved around health updates, grandchildren, and mutual care.
We are often told to be relentlessly aggressive about our careers, to chase that ambitious specialization, and to build something we love showing up for every single day. That drive matters. But the things that feel like the absolute end of the world today the missed promotion, the delayed paper, the competitive benchmark..simply aren't!
Life is a sum total of everything, not just professional CV
Live fully, enjoy the present moment, and hold your near and dear ones tight.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Treat your body and mind as a temple. That's free.
You won't need any other.
Rs 85,000 buys you the world's first "roomdeaf" AI.
It can't hear the room, and its maker can't hear the questions.
It's "a project, not a product."
It scores your "pharmacological system."
Its terms disclaim the accuracy of its data.
Walk. Sleep. Know your BP and sugar. Love people. Keep learning.
Free. Well supported. No pre-order.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
INDIA: NEED FOR A NATIONAL AGENDA BEYOND PERSONALITIES & PARTISAN POLITICS: 1/2
This is not a partisan post, nor is it written to attract mass attention. This should be treated as pain & anguish of all those Indians who selflessly gave the best years of their lifeโs, and many sacrificed their lives itself, to chase a dream for an India that was strong and conscientious enough to usher in a safer and happier world through strength of itโs inherently humanistic civilisational values.
I am absolutely confident that piratic psyche of owners of X platform, alongside compromised Indians, shall block visibility of this post. Yet I persist.
Honโble Leader of the Opposition of India has captured our imagination by relentlessly exposing failures of the Government. He has ventured into a territory - control of our political space by global deep states- that none dared to broach in the past even though it is an unmistakable reality in the entire developing world with fragile institutions. Given the size of our democratic nation and its longer roots, it must cause national indignation. But it is missing.
And our Honโble LoP seems driven more by quest for power rather than a vision for nation-building. Even if he wins every political argument, will India transform?
His critics can counter attack saying:
His familyโs dynastic/entitlement politics weakened institutions, undermined internal democracy, concentrated power around a family & mentally conditioned generations to believe that their salvation lay in mental slavery to individuals rather than resurrection of India as a great state & civilisation or betterment of their own lives.
Pandit Nehru was not the supreme leader of the kind Indira Gandhi ji or Modi ji. Accomplishments & failures of his era were were shared.
Yet history is never black and white. India also benefited from transformative leaders and reforms beyond any single family or party.
The real issue is larger.
If a Prime Minister can be compromised, the deeper failure lies in weak institutions and poor societal psyche that tolerates it. Can this ever be remedied by caste and identity politics that both Honโble LoP and Honโble PM have been peddling? Where right or wrong doesnโt matter & loyalty to a leader is supreme?
Where is the national conversation on institutional integrity, corruption, judicial reform, administrative accountability, scientific excellence and nation-building?
India's democracy increasingly resembles a football match with compromised referees. Two competing formations appear to be vying only for power & that too at cost of the nation?
Meanwhile, key national indicators are alarming. Over 1/3rd of our children remain stunted due to undernutrition. It impacts their lifelong cognitive capacity/productivity. The World Bank estimates that 56% of Indian children cannot read and comprehend.
India aspires to be a global power, yet our expenditure on research and development remains around 0.64% of GDP, much lower than major innovation-driven economies. We export our best brains and those who are left behind are framed, persecuted & killed by compromised cartels in police, judiciary, politics & bureaucracy?
These are not statistics. These are warnings.
Corruption& dishonesty have been normalised. Integrity is viewed as a handicap while manipulation is celebrated as success. Large sections of our judiciary & police systems appear compromised & corrupted beyond redemption.
Transparency International continues to rank us as one of the most corrupt nations. The consequence is a much weaker India than our potentials.
For all practical purposes, many of our institutions remain vulnerable to political capture. Both ruling & opposition forces often seek to control institutions rather than strengthen them. Citizens are mobilised in the name of caste/religion and often through corruptionโฆ..
@RahulGandhi @narendramodi
#India #politics #democracy #Nation #NationalSecurity #Democracy
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Medical school taught me anatomy, physiology, and pathology. It taught me how to memorize, how to endure, and how to work longer hours than most people thought possible. What it didn't teach me was how to practice medicine with a full view of the human experience, mine included. Here's what I wish I had known from the start:
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Excellent!
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
The Galton Board demonstrates the Central Limit Theorem by showing how steel balls, as they pass through levels of branching paths, consistently form a bell curve distribution. This illustrates how random processes tend to cluster around the average.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
1 in 7 rupees in India did not exist a year ago.
M3 money supply grew 16% this year. Inflation, on paper, is 5.5%.
This is the most under-discussed, persistent problem in the Indian economy. This 16% โhidden taxโ is starting to show up everywhere:
1. Gold is up 17% in INR - almost exactly the M3 money supply increase. Interesting, right?
2. Domestic GST collections are up 15.8%. Also almost exactly the growth in money supply. The โrecord GSTโ is just taxing more money being printed.
3. GST on imports is up 42%, because the rupee fell 7.6%, on top of increased costs. We shouldnโt celebrate paying more tax on the same iPhone.
4. The most egregious one: 7.8% real GDP growth assumes prices across the whole economy rose just 2.3%. (Nominal GDP grew 10.3%. Use the 5.5% CPI instead and real growth is closer to 4.5%.) Does your lived experience validate a laughable 2.3% inflation?
5. The one thing that did NOT keep up is your portfolio. Since 1997, money supply is up 44x and the Sensex is up 20x. Put every INR you had into Indian stocks for 30 years and the money printer beat you by 2X.
Taxes keep going up. Capital controls keep tightening. Inflation keeps going up. The structural problems, courts, land, labour and the cost of capital, stay exactly where they were, hidden under a nominal GDP number. We are printing like thereโs no tomorrow and pretending nothing is wrong.
Ludwig von Mises called inflation โthe true opium of the people administered to them by anti-capitalist governments and parties.โ
Printing is the easiest way to keep welfare flowing and the headlines green without fixing a single structural problem. Inflation is the most immoral tax that we pay, without knowing weโre paying it.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
We can disagree on Andy approach, but we have lost a generation or two to complexities that could be built and implemented. We went by a coders easy life, and sorry to borrow a crude term, techno-coolies. It was good for the schools, the workplaces and even the kids to have this dreamโฆ the elusive Amrikan dream now in every major city and the elusive Indian dream of having a white collar job in every syllabi.
Where we missed the original clusters that was getting built. Instead of clusters, we started promoting MLAs, MPs and their constituencies to keep winning votes. Even those knew it has nothing to do with the goals
Of the nation and only to do with them winning the next term.
And here, in this glorious mess of comparing ourselves with everyone, and technically have become a large consuming class of desires.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Akash Prakash has invested in Indian equities for over 30 years. In today's Business Standard he writes that, for the first time, global allocators are asking him whether India needs a dedicated allocation at all.
India's weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets index has fallen from 21% in September 2024 to about 10%. TSMC alone now carries a weight 50% larger than the whole of India.
Since that peak, he puts Indian equities down about 25% in dollar terms while EM indices are up about 50%.
He still reads this as a contrarian signal and expects the tide to turn.
Global funds are asking whether India deserves its own bucket.
Most Indian investors have never asked that question the other way. For them, India is the whole portfolio.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
โI told you soโ is not something to mention cheerfully, especially when what was said is negative.
From the time long term capital gains tax was brought back, I have been tirelessly pointing out how unfair it is to have both STT and long term capital gains tax.
Even when I was a BJP supporter, I criticised how disastrous the 2019 budget was. From that time, I have been consistent in saying that Nirmala Sitharaman is unfit to be a finance minister.
She reduced corporate tax but kept the individual tax rate as it is. In fact, the individual tax rate went as high as 42 percent and is now around 39 percent.
Income tax is paid by a tiny fraction of the population. Still, the amount they pay is more than what all corporates in India put together pay.
Individuals paying cumulatively more than corporates started only during the period of the current Finance Minister. This is a travesty of justice.
This government has no clue about capital markets or risk capital. Prime Ministerโs most trusted officer Hasmukh Adhia said making profits from markets requires no effort. Then why do very few create wealth and most get wiped out from capital markets?
Neither Hasmukh Adhia nor Nirmala Sitharaman would have ever invested even a single rupee in capital markets.
All asset classes are not equal because the nature of risk is different. In a capital starved country, risk capital needs to be incentivised.
For those who say it is only the secondary market, without ease of entry and exit in secondary markets, the primary market would cease to exist. And without that, there would be zero risk capital.
The odds of success in trading are already very low. The government has kept increasing STT, making trading unviable.
The government simply does not understand that trading provides two important things for markets: liquidity and price discovery. Without liquidity and price discovery, secondary markets would become practically useless.
Even in 2024, after NDA won the elections, I tagged the Prime Minister multiple times stating that anyone other than Nirmala Sitharaman should be considered for Finance Minister because she would prove to be economically disastrous for the country. And unfortunately, I am proven right.
The Finance Ministry is only good at setting narratives like poverty has been rooted out in India, we would become a developed superpower by 2047, and the latest narrative of how economically powerful we are becoming on a PPP basis.
I have repeatedly shown with data and facts how every single narrative is false and disconnected from reality. The Finance Ministry lives in a completely different reality.
Even developed nations understand how important foreign capital is. But our finance minister said in Parliament it is ok if foreign capital goes away because we have domestic retail investors. Certain statements are coming back to haunt us.
As I have said in the past, it is not that this government did not do anything positive. But given the huge mandate, the last twelve years are wasted opportunities on an overall basis. And the contribution of the Finance Ministry to these wasted opportunities is significant.
For many years, I have been trolled, criticised, and abused for questioning the finance minister and the governmentโs economic policies.
Now every well meaning individual realises how disastrous the Finance Minister has been for both the economy and capital markets.
My views stand vindicated now. Still, you do not feel happy when your negative views come true.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Living longer and better doesn't require anything remotely complicated.
I'm 63 and have been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The people who do best aren't doing anything crazy or exotic. They just refuse to let their lives narrow and acting accordingly.
Hereโs my Twitter book โฆ
- Don't smoke
- Keep alcohol modest or absent.
- Move
- Move more
- Keep moving
- Push and pull heavy things
- Sleep 7 hours.
- Have friends
- Keep moving.
- Find a reason to get out of bed in the morning!
- A sense of purpose is key.
- See your friends in person.
- Keep moving. For real benefit- consider 500+ min/wk. Sureโฆ 120 min/week works. But my goal is vastly higher.
- Eat real food that you cook.
You can read books that say something else. You can try one of a thousand supplements or research grade injectables. Wonโt matter one bit for most of you. Might hurt some of you.
Simple works really well.
Form the habitsโฆ they will largely determine your destiny.
There are no shortcuts.
There are no shortcuts.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
On a logarithmic scale we sit well toward the cosmic end. There are about 35 orders of magnitude between us and the Planck length, and only about 26 between us and the edge of what we can see.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
By weight, about 90% of your body was forged inside stars. The other 10% is hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years old.
Either way, you're older than the Sun.
#funtrivia
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Your brain has 86 billion neurons. The Milky Way has 100 to 400 billion stars.โจYour body has 7 billion billion billion atoms, more than all the stars in the observable universe.โจEvery day you replace 330 billion cells. Almost a galaxy a day.
You are not in the universe.โจYou are the universe, briefly arranged, for as long as you live on this beautiful home called Earth.
And yet the universe is 10ยฒโท times bigger than you.
#funtrivia
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
All good doctors already follow all of this and a lot more.
Real questions are -
1. Will NMC actively go after those who don't? Or hide behind "we have not received any complaint yet"
2. Will govt apply this to ALL healthcare individuals, NGOs, Charities and corporations?
3. Will govt apply this to ALL pathies, especially govt blue eyes pathies that have most unscientific claims and largest ad-spends ?
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Immortal words from Jacob Bronowski:
โIt is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself.
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: โI beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistakenโ.
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.โ
