SriBees Random Ramblings: GBUF 2025: The Good, Bad, Ugly & Funny Year That Was! 🎉

#sriGINthoughts #GBUF #GoodBadUglyFunny #Year2025ThatWas

Happy New Year! 🥳

Have a great year ahead!

🌍 World Affairs

2025 started with a bang.
🇺🇸 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! 🏆]
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. 🏛️ 43 days; longest in history.]

🇮🇳 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! 😆). 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? 😉) 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.

🌏 RoW

🇸🇬Singapore’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? 👏
🇯🇵 Sanae Takaichi became the first woman PM of the Land of Rising Sun as Japan wakes up slowly to a conservative sun.
🇨🇳 China continues quietly building more capabilities and consolidating as usual.

🏏 Sports

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! 🤣

🝘 And yeah, England woozily lost The Ashes in 11 days.
🏆But the pièce de résistance? 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!
🎮 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 😊

🎬 Arts

Avatar landed. Consensus is ‘more of the same’. Money being burnt into ashes by the fire, I suppose. 🔥
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 🎵. But it will take beating to move me away from Sai Abhyankar’s Oorum Blood <3

💻 Technology

While excellent progress was made on the fusion and quantum computing fronts, the real king was AI and all the moats (+ crocodiles 🤣) around it. 🤖
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! 🛌)
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. 💰

😂 You-Gotta-Be-Kidding-Me!

Louvre heisters’ adherence to work-life balance 🖼️
Enterprising people making money by dipping photos at the Maha Kumbh (~660 million had a holy dip; not counting the photos!) 🌊

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!” 🙏
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 😁) decided to find solace in music – to be more precise in a musician, Katy Perry – they are Insta official 💑