#sriGINthoughts
#GBUF #GoodBadUglyFunny #Year2025ThatWas
Happy New Year! ๐ฅณ
Have a great year ahead!
๐ World Affairs
2025 started with a
bang.
๐บ๐ธ Donald J. Trump took over the reins of the largest economy of the world. He was
a man on a mission. America First.
- Cleanup government: [For a change, Musk was not shitposting about Google and Sam Altman but about ‘billions’ of government savings by changing a flag in the software and what not! DOGE was more like the eponymous meme coin: more flash and less substance.]
- Stop all wars through Truth Social and X: [The two great wars are on low entropy: On one side destruction happens. On the other side diplomacy
is racing. Ceasefires are bandied about. Yet periodic violence and clashes
persist. Humanitarian conditions worsen.]
- Get Nobel Peace Prize: [Next year, Shyam! ๐]
- Tariff became the new WMD – both
internally and externally:
[World reeled initially. Then slowly learnt how to reel it in. Smaller
countries bowed. Tim Cook gifted a gold and glass statue and he is a
‘great man.’ China and India are the current non-blinkers.]
- Shut down the government: [Sorry, no budgets. ๐️ 43 days; longest in history.]
๐ฎ๐ณ India
- India was rocked by a terrorist attack in
the beautiful Kashmir valley at Pahalgam. Scores were shot dead and more
got injured by a group that finds its origins in Pakistan-based LeT.
- India responded swiftly with focussed
attacks – Operation Sindoor – on terror infra sites in Pakistan.
Some planes were lost. The speed with which the US stepped in and even pre-empted
the ceasefire announcement was perhaps due to critical strikes in
Pakistan, continuance of which would have meant more embarrassing damage.
- The ruling BJP won more elections – vote chori
or not (one small room was the address of 83 voters! ๐). Delhi, Bihar and the sweetest of them all – local body elections
in Kerala! Foothold finally in God’s own country?
- Tamil Nadu continues to rise in the
economic and wellness indicators of the country. In line with the
cine-fixation of the masses, actor (can one call him that? ๐) Vijay wants to emulate the legendary MGR in politics – but no
real chops to show! Ruling DMK is shaken, perhaps stirred too!
- Modi is still cold-shouldering the US –
understandably so.
๐ RoW
- ๐ธ๐ฌSingapore’s ruling PAP won yet another election. Lawrence Wong managed to do the impossible – won with higher share of popular vote. And his tariff speech? ๐
- ๐ฏ๐ต Sanae Takaichi became the first woman PM
of the Land of Rising Sun as Japan wakes up slowly to a conservative sun.
- ๐จ๐ณ China continues quietly building more
capabilities and consolidating as usual.
๐ Sports
- ๐India’s second most popular religion, Cricket,
threw up some heady stuff.
- Women’s World Cup? ✅
- Men’s Champions Trophy? ✅
- Politics and performance (lack of) threw out many a
stalwart: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ashwin etc.
- 14-year-old (pls don’t doubt that!) Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is thrashing every bowler – as long as they are minnows! ๐คฃ
- ๐ And yeah, England woozily lost The Ashes
in 11 days.
- ๐But the piรจce de
rรฉsistance? The Cup became
Namdu! RCB won the 18th edition of IPL!! What followed in the
Chinnaswamy Stadium stampede definitely tarnished the sheen. But then,
with ephemeral public memory, who cares?
- ⚽ EPL: Liverpool won the last season but spiralled down after the unfortunate death of Diego Jota. They have shown some gumption and climbed to the Top-4 with Arsenal, City and surprise, surprise, Aston Villa!
- ๐ฎ Saudis got bored on spending on city building etc., so turned the money train towards Electronic Arts, the gaming company; acquired them for an obscene USD 55 billion.
- Swede Armand Mondo Duplantis – got
a mondo record in pole vault - 6.30m – don’t let him near your home
compound ๐
๐ฌ Arts
- Avatar landed. Consensus is ‘more of the same’. Money being burnt into
ashes by the fire, I suppose. ๐ฅ
- On OTT, Netflix cracked it with the
one-shot-per-episode Adolescence. Technically, ideologically,
socially, a wonderful series that all parents must watch.
- Tamil movie industry failed to excite.
Mollywood continued to belt bangers out: Ponman and Kishkinda
Kandam excited us.
- Dhurandhar (Hindi or Urdu?) is the true blockbuster
by a mile and still has legs.
- The real surprise package was Sandalwood:
the earthy Su from So and Kantara Chapter 1 plus a
few others like Agnyathavaasi really made us sit up and notice.
- Musically, Flipperachi’s FA9LA from Dhurandhar is the new earworm ๐ต. But it will take beating to move me away from Sai Abhyankar’s Oorum Blood <3
๐ป Technology
- While excellent progress was made on the fusion and quantum computing
fronts, the real king was AI and all the moats (+ crocodiles ๐คฃ) around
it. ๐ค
- More LLMs flooded the market. Agentic AI
became the new buzzword. AI actors spouted. Timelines filled with AI songs
[just give lyrics!].
- With more reliance on technology, outages
also hit the headlines. AWS, Google, Azure and Cloudflare – all of them
had major P1s – causing billions discomfort (smart beds won’t heat up or
fold! ๐)
- Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho’s Arattai
briefly became the Signal of 2025 to dethrone WhatsApp. The initial
nationalistic euphoria has died eventually.
- If you had invested $1000 in an equal
portfolio of Gold, Silver and Nvidia [most valuable company at 5T
market cap!] at the beginning of the year, your portfolio would have
doubled. ๐ฐ
๐ You-Gotta-Be-Kidding-Me!
- Louvre heisters’ adherence to work-life balance
๐ผ️
- Enterprising people making money by
dipping photos at the Maha Kumbh (~660 million had a holy dip; not
counting the photos!) ๐
- Indigo Airlines playing “We don’t have
pilots!” bringing Indian aviation to its knees for a few days ✈️
- Trump and Vance schooling Zelenskyy in the
Oval Office: “Say Thank You!” ๐
- A random meme 6-7 became the teen-rage of the year!
- After resigning from his key posts, Justin
Trudeau (he didn’t want to be called the Governor of the 51st state, I
suppose ๐) decided to find solace in music – to be more precise in a
musician, Katy Perry – they are Insta official ๐
Views are personal. Any hurt unintentional.
Sources: Of course, internet. ChatGPT used for proof-reading; had to struggle hard to make it not rewrite & not replace my dashes with em-dashes ๐
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