If you don’t get the answers you need, maybe you are asking the wrong questions. Sometimes, it’s not the answers we want but the right questions to guide your reading experience

Make reading work for you — don’t make it a distraction from the real work you need to do to change your life. Books can easily become a distraction if you don’t read with a bigger purpose.

For every book you choose, gather as many answers as possible, put the book down and start doing. Otherwise, you are just gathering knowledge and wasting your time in the process.

And even if you find the best books to guide you, it’s insanely important to put the books down and do the actual work. Practising what you learn is the final stage of learning from great authors.

Books don’t have all the answers. You can’t get all your answers from books, but they will give the great start you need to make real change in your life.

Learning from people who have skin in the game is the most powerful way to gain experiential knowledge from others

If you tend to procrastinate a lot, find a book with practical answers to overcoming that habit. And whilst reading, note down specific solutions that can work for you.

If you want to succeed at whatever you do, you need to start with creating an environment that makes it impossible not to succeed.

all the techniques and tips to succeed and make money on Medium can be found online. For example, you need to select one or two niches, make a list of tags and show up daily

Embracing strong character and self-control means living an examined life, where you’ve thought deeply about what kind of person you want to be, and what kind of contributions you want to make to society.

Politeness should be the expression of a benevolent regard for the feelings of others; it’s a poor virtue if it’s motivated only by a fear of offending good taste. In its highest form Politeness approaches love.”

The author Nitobe Inazo, in his book, “Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan,” interpreted the samurai code of behavior and how chivalrous men should act in their personal and professional lives.What follows are Bushido’s Eight Virtues, as explained by Nitobe.

Has social media made us more narcissistic and insecure, or were we always that way?

Where will all these influencers take us?

Where once there were editors, publishers, and gatekeepers for the content we consume, now anyone with a smartphone can write, record, film, and publish with reckless abandon.The Internet has democratized the sharing and distribution of creative content. In the past, you needed talent and connections, now you just need a smartphone and social media accounts to share whatever you like.This is a good thing because it’s easier than ever to share content, and the underrepresented have a greater voice now. But it’s also a bad thing, for two reasons.First, our attention spans have diminished. Where once people could sit for hours immersed in a good book or an extended conversation, now they get restless if their favorite YouTube channel doesn’t load fast enough.Second, there is little to no quality control. Our lives are bombarded by millions of blogs, YouTube channels, and social media sites. Sometimes the cream rises to the top, but often the loudest, most outrageous, and superficial content gets all the attention.

India possesses about seventeen trillion cubic feet of natural gas in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Odisha

Salsette Island is India's most populous island on which the city of Mumbai (Bombay) is located

India's only active volcano, Barren Island is situated here. It last erupted in 2017

The Karakoram is situated in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. It has more than sixty peaks above 7,000 m (23,000 ft), including K2, the second highest peak in the world 8,611 m (28,251 ft). K2 is just 237 m (778 ft) smaller than the 8,848 m (29,029 ft) Mount Everest. The range is about 500 km (310 mi) in length and the most heavily glaciated part of the world outside of the polar regions. The Siachen Glacier at 76 km (47 mi) and the Biafo Glacier at 67 km (42 mi) rank as the world's second and third-longest glaciers outside the polar regions.[23] Just to the west of the northwest end of the Karakoram, lies the Hindu Raj range, beyond which is the Hindu Kush range. The southern boundary of the Karakoram is formed by the Gilgit, Indus and Shyok rivers, which separate the range from the northwestern end of the Himalayas.

Cratons are a specific kind of continental crust made up of a top layer called platform and an older layer called basement. A shield is the part of a craton where basement rock crops out of the ground, and it is relatively the older and more stable section, unaffected by plate tectonics

The border with Burma (Myanmar) extends up to 1,643 km (1,021 mi) along the southern borders of India's northeastern states viz. Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram.[17] Located amidst the Himalayan range, India's border with Bhutan runs 699 km (434 mi).[1] Sikkim, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh are the states which share the border with Bhutan.[18] The border with Nepal runs 1,751 km (1,088 mi) along the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India.[1] Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim are the states which share the border with Nepal.[19] The Siliguri Corridor, narrowed sharply by the borders of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, connects peninsular India with the northeastern states.

The Line of Actual Control (LAC) is the effective border between India and the People's Republic of China. It traverses 4,057 km along the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh

West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram are the states which share the border with Bangladesh

India is divided into 28 States (further subdivided into districts) and 8 union territories including the National capital territory (i.e., Delhi).

India is thus referred to as the "fastest continent".[9]

Largest lakeLoktak Lake(freshwater)287 km2 (111 sq mi) Chilika Lake(brackish water)1100 km2 (424 sq mi)

Lowest pointKuttanad−2.2 m (−7.2 ft)

BordersTotal land borders:[1] 15,200 km (9,400 mi)Bangladesh:4,096.70 km (2,545.57 mi) China (PRC):3,488 km (2,167 mi)Pakistan:3,323 km (2,065 mi)Nepal:1,751 km (1,088 mi)Myanmar:1,643 km (1,021 mi)Bhutan:699 km (434 mi)

 • Land91% • Water9%

Kangchenjunga, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is the highest point in India at 8,586 m (28,169 ft) and the world's third highest peak

India is the world’s largest producer of mica blocks and mica splittings. With the recent spurt in world demand for chromite. India has stepped up its production to rech the second rank among the chromite producers of the world.             Besides, India ranks, 3rd in production of coal & lignite, 2nd in barites, 4th in iron ore, 5th in bauxite and crude steel, 7th in manganese ore and 8th in aluminium.

Mawsynram (/ˈmɔːsɪnˌrʌm/) is a town in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya state in Northeastern India, 60.9 kilometres from Shillong. Mawsynram receives the highest rainfall in India. It is reportedly the wettest place on Earth, with an average annual rainfall of 11,872 millimetres (467.4 in),[1][2][3] but that claim is disputed by Lloró, Colombia, which reported an average yearly rainfall of 12,717 millimetres (500.7 in) between 1952 and 1989[4][5] and López de Micay, also in Colombia, which reported 12,892 mm (507.6 in) per year between 1960 and 2012.[6][7]

A katabatic wind (named from the Greek word κατάβασις katabasis, meaning "descending") is a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. Such winds are sometimes also called fall winds; the spelling catabatic winds[1] is also used. Katabatic winds can rush down elevated slopes at hurricane speeds, but most are not as intense as that, and many are 10 knots (18 km/h) or less. Not all downslope winds are katabatic. For instance, winds such as the föhn and chinook are rain shadow winds where air driven upslope on the windward side of a mountain range drops its moisture and descends leeward drier and warmer. Examples of true katabatic winds include the bora in the Adriatic, the Bohemian Wind or Böhmwind in the Ore Mountains, the Santa Ana in southern California, the piteraq winds of Greenland, and the oroshi in Japan. Another example is "the Barber", an enhanced katabatic wind that blows over the town of Greymouth in New Zealand when there is a southeast flow over the South Island. "The Barber" has a local reputation for its coldness.

Kuttanad (Malayalam: കുട്ടനാട്‌) is a region covering the Alappuzha, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta Districts, in the state of Kerala, India, well known for its vast paddy fields and geographical peculiarities. The region has the lowest altitude in India, and is one of the few places in the world where farming is carried on around 1.2 to 3.0 metres (4 to 10 ft) below sea level.Kilimanjaro in Africa is the another place [1][2] Kuttanadu is historically important in the ancient history of South India and is the major rice producer in the state. Farmers of Kuttanad are famous for Biosaline Farming. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has declared the Kuttanad Farming System as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS).

By value, the textile industry accounts for 7% of India's industrial, 2% of GDP and 15% of the country's export earnings

India holds a 20% market share in the global supply of generics by volume.[262] The Indian pharmaceutical sector also supplies over 62% of the global demand for various vaccines.[263]

Petroleum products and chemicals are a major contributor to India's industrial GDP, and together they contribute over 34% of its export earnings. India hosts many oil refinery and petrochemical operations, including the world's largest refinery complex in Jamnagar that processes 1.24 million barrels of crude per day.[257]

India has a coastline of 7,500 kilometres (4,700 mi) with 13 major ports and 60 operational non-major ports, which together handle 95% of the country's external trade by volume and 70% by value (most of the remainder handled by air).[253] Nhava Sheva, Mumbai is the largest public port, while Mundra is the largest private sea port.[254]

The Indian railway network is the fourth-largest rail network in the world, with a track length of 114,500 kilometres (71,100 mi) and 7,172 stations.

India has a road network of over 5,472,144 kilometres (3,400,233 mi) as of 31 March 2015,[update] the second-largest road network in the world only behind the United States.

After crude oil and petroleum products, the export and import of gold, precious metals, precious stones, gems and jewellery accounts for the largest portion of India's global trade. The industry contributes about 7% of India's GDP, employs millions, and is a major source of its foreign-exchange earnings.[244]

Engineering is the largest sub-sector of India's industrial sector, by GDP, and the third-largest by exports.[236]

India became the world's third-largest producer of electricity in 2013 with a 4.8% global share in electricity generation, surpassing Japan and Russia.[226]

Oil and natural gas fields are located offshore at Bombay High, Krishna Godavari Basin and the Cauvery Delta, and onshore mainly in the states of Assam, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Primary energy consumption of India is the third-largest after China and the US with 5.3% global share in the year 2015.[221] Coal and crude oil together account for 85% of the primary energy consumption of India. India's oil reserves meet 25% of the country's domestic oil demand.[222][223]

India has the second-largest amount of arable land, after the US, with 52% of total land under cultivation. Although the total land area of the country is only slightly more than one-third of China or the US, India's arable land is marginally smaller than that of the US, and marginally larger than that of China. However, agricultural output lags far behind its potential.[207]

Imports $474 billion (2019–20)[29]Import goodsAgricultural products 5.5%Fuels and mining products 38.6%Manufacturers 47.9%Other 8%[30]Main import partners China 14.3% European Union 8.9% United States 7.3% United Arab Emirates 6.3% Saudi Arabia 5.6%Other 57.5%[30]

Main export partners United States 16.8% European Union 14.6% United Arab Emirates 9.1% China 5.3% Hong Kong 3.6%Other 50.5%[30]

Exports $313 billion (2019–20)[29]Export goodsAgricultural products 12%Fuels and mining products 18.5%Manufacturers 68.7%Others 0.8%[30]

GDP by component Household consumption: 59.1% Government consumption: 11.5% Investment in fixed capital: 28.5% Investment in inventories: 3.9% Exports of goods and services: 19.1% Imports of goods and services: −22% (2017 est.)[12]

GDP by sector Agriculture: 16% Industry: 25% Manufacturing: 14% Services: 49.9% (FY 2019)[11]

India is the world's largest manufacturer of generic drugs, and its pharmaceutical sector fulfills over 50% of the global demand for vaccines.[83]

India has a high public debt with 86% of GDP, while its fiscal deficit stood at 9.5% of GDP.[36] [37]

It has the world's fourth-largest foreign-exchange reserves worth $585 billion.[42]

Nearly 66% of India's population is rural,[75] and contributes about 50% of India's GDP.[76]

Nearly 66% of India's population is rural,[75] and contributes about 50% of India's GDP.[76]

India is the world's sixth-largest manufacturer, representing 3% of global manufacturing output, and employs over 57 million people.[73][74]

The service sector makes up 50% of GDP and remains the fastest growing sector, while the industrial sector and the agricultural sector employs a majority of the labor force.[71]

In 2019–20, the foreign direct investment (FDI) in India was $74.4 billion with the service sector, computer, and telecom industry remains leading sectors for FDI inflows.[68]

In 2020, India's ten largest trading partners were the United States, China, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, and Malaysia.[67]

Since India has a vast informal economy, barely 2% of Indians pay income taxes.[63]

It ranks 63rd on the Ease of doing business index and 68th on the Global Competitiveness Report.[60]

India has been a member of the World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995.[59

In 2019, India was the world's ninth-largest importer and the twelfth-largest exporter.[58]

Nearly 60% of India's GDP is driven by domestic private consumption[55] and continues to remain the world's sixth-largest consumer market.[56] Apart from private consumption, India's GDP is also fueled by government spending, investment, and exports.[57]

The long-term growth perspective of the Indian economy remains positive due to its young population and corresponding low dependency ratio, healthy savings, and investment rates, increasing globalisation in India and integration into the global economy.[12

It is the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).[44] According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on a per capita income basis, India ranked 145th by GDP (nominal) and 122th by GDP (PPP).[45]

Improving nutrition calls for a systems approach, cutting across health, food and care systems with data-backed digital tools providing an enabling backbone to scale evidence-based interventions. There is growing evidence that convergent actions, especially agriculture-nutrition convergence and strengthening of demand-side behaviour can play a pivotal role in preventing undernutrition.

The Legislative Council existed till 1969 till a resolution was passed in the Assembly for its dissolution

passage of the resolution does not mean that the Council has come into existence. “Under Article 169, Parliament will have to provide for creation of the Council

The West Bengal Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution to set up Legislative Council with a two-thirds majority

Another suggested step is for blood banks across China to test blood samples from 2019 to see whether they carried antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. This could provide a clue to how early the virus was circulating in human populations.

One important step would be widespread sampling of animals in farms across China that supplied the markets in Wuhan in the search of ancestor viruses to SARS-CoV-2. Workers in farms need to be tested as well for exposure to SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses.

The only solution is to work with China

But science is being elbowed aside by politics

finding virus samples from the earliest stages of the outbreak in Wuhan, reconstructing their genetic sequences, and then fitting them to a family tree that will hopefully lead to the common ancestor of the diverse strains and variants of SARS-CoV-2 that have spread globally. This could also provide clues as to whether this ancestor emerged in wildlife, in farms and markets, or from a laboratory.

I’m often surprised more people haven’t heard of a free wiki called TV Tropes. (It’s not just about TV). The site collects frequent tropes used in storytelling, explains how they work, and then lists endless examples in books, movies, and other media.

While focused work is how you learn things, it’s lateral thinking that consolidates skills and deepens your understanding.

Mastery is incomplete without lateral thinking.

Researchers even found that taking breaks to widen your vision helps to restructure your thoughts and improve your focus when back at your desk.

Panoramic looking — gazing at the horizon or scanning your surroundings — also stimulates lateral thinking.

According to scientists, closing your eyes, even for a few heartbeats, deactivates your attention and helps you reevaluate a situation from a fresh perspective

Short naps are another doorway to lateral thinking, as evidenced by Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali. To energise their creativity, both the inventor and the surrealist painter made a habit of taking short naps

You can even prime your mind to dream about specific problems. For example, if you mull over a problem right before drifting to sleep, chances are you will dream of working on it or even solving it.

Sleep is probably the most effective way to swing the doors of lateral thinking wide open. While asleep, your brain is hard at work cementing what you’ve learned during waking hours

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the best ways to get into lateral thinking is to go for a walk. Solitary walks ignite creativity, as testified by many inventive people throughout history.

You’ll walk away from reading it with a better understanding of the theoretical concepts behind information and what it means to encode and decode information, what it means to process information, and how we measure the amount of information and how much information can be sent over our internet connections.

The book explores the history of information and information processing as well as look at how figures like Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse and Alan Turing (this guy again!) made key contributions. Then, it looks at Claude Shannon who created information theory — and gave rise to the “bit” — the binary digit — we’re familiar with today.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

walks the reader through the inner workings of computers using many illustrations and helpful analogies. Petzold slowly builds up the groundwork understanding needed to understand how computers work.Slowly, piece by piece, the book builds up a fully working computer including memory and screen.

Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

In the book, author Charles Petzold interleaves a biography of Alan Turing with his seminal work on computability, in many ways the genesis of our modern computer age. As the biography progresses, Perzold introduces the mathematical concepts needed to later explain Turing’s historic 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers”. It makes for fascinating reading, with Petzold’s annotations of Turing’s academic paper making it much more accessible.

The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold

The point of a 5-hour workday isn’t to get everybody to work less. Instead, it’s to promote autonomy and stop productivity-shaming those who’ve found ways to produce the same value in fewer hours

When you find a way to work more efficiently and put in fewer hours, you’re penalized and thought of as lazy rather than celebrated for better results

Research from Alex Pang, owner of Silicon Valley consultancy Strategy and Rest, and an author who has done extensive work on the ties between shorter working hours and productivity says, “5 hours is about the maximum that most of us can concentrate hard on something.”Henry Ford was way ahead of us. Henry messed with the idea of 5-hour workdays a long time ago and found they increased productivity.

Productivity expert Cal Newport describes deep work as a “professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Valuable work that produces money has limits

What we think of as a workday is often a lot less in actual work time when we break it down

Becciu, who was forced to resign in September last year, is among 10 people who have been accused of wrongdoing related to the purchase of a plush property in central London using church money. He will appear before a tribunal from July 27.

Cardinal Angelo Becciu, an influential Catholic cleric from Italy, has been ordered to stand trial by a Vatican judge over alleged financial crimes, the Holy See announced on Saturday.

nd don’t forget to think for yourself when you learn from others. Ask questions for deeper understanding. Learn to make your own notes about what you think about what they say or share. Build your capacity for thought.

These are a few of the newsletters I read every almost week to learn new ideas, concepts, models and smart ways to think — Brain Pickings, Farnam Street, More to That, Collaborative Fund Blog, James Clear’s The 3–2–1 Newsletter, Naval, Seth Godin, David Perrell’s newsletters, Commonplace, Psyche, Behavioral Scientist (What We’re Reading), Maker Mind, and Robinhood Snacks.

1,000 smart minds can make you an expert generalist or expert specialist

Taking full responsibility for your learning is how you become a better version of yourself. To deliberately control your learning and unlearning process, find the top 1000 brilliant minds and consistently learn from them

I call it the 1000 minds rule because it’s the optimal number of people you can improve how you think. One thousand sources of knowledge is more than enough to learn new things every day.

At any given point I have about 10-20 books on my “to go” list. Books that I can just pop in and continue reading. Every day I read at least 10% of a non-fiction book that gives me tons  of new ideas, an inspirational book, a fiction book of high-quality  writing, and maybe a book on games (lately I’ve been solving chess  puzzles). And then I start writing

Bit if I’m coming up with business ideas, how do I know if I’m on the right track? There’s no way to know in advance if a business idea is a good one.

No idea is so big you can’t take the first step. If the first step seems to hard, make it simpler. And don’t worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice.

I divide my paper into two columns. On one column is the list of ideas. On the other column is the list of  “FIRST STEPS”. Remember, only the first step. Because you have no idea where that first step will take you.

looking at education and learning from a narrow utilitarian perspective,

In “Requiem for the Students”, one of the essays in Where Are We Now?, Agamben points out how a “much more crucial aspect” of going online for classes is, “significantly, going unnoticed: the end of student life as a form of existence

a considerable, and maybe the most valuable, part of the learning in educational institutions takes place outside the classroom, in peer interactions that occur in places and spaces within campus but hidden from the gaze of teachers and other authority figures.

In an article published in Inside Higher Ed in June 2020, Peter C. Herman, professor at San Diego State University, wrote of how his students responded when asked to narrate their experience of online education: “But for all their differences in age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, citizenship and intellectual preparedness, they [i.e. students] universally agreed on their evaluation of online learning: they hated it.

the ways in which the teaching process and protocols will be adversely affected

blindness to the digital divide that exists at all levels of education in India — a divide that the ongoing pandemic has only served to further exacerbate

University Grants Commission’s latest proposal for “blended learning”, wherein up to 40 per cent of the courses a student takes up at the college/university level can be through the virtual digital mode, is in keeping with the vision of the NEP 2020, whereby physical campuses and classrooms are sought to be, wholly or largely, replaced by online entities.

questions raised about just how the government is going to find the funds for the ambitious, feel-good plans outlined in the NEP 2020,

possible deleterious effects of a centralized command structure for curriculum design and research-fund allocation that the NEP 2020 envisages.

The potential of the National Education Policy 2020 — pushed through without any real consultation with stakeholders, especially state governments — to further increase the divide between the haves and the have-nots has already been much discussed