GOOD DIGESTION AND REDUCING BLOATING STOMOCH FULL NESS

 Your current mix of powdered saunf (fennel), ajwain (carom), and jeera (cumin) is a well-established Ayurvedic digestive remedy. The combination works well because:

Half a teaspoon after meals is the correct dosage �.
Recommendations to Reduce Bloating & Acidity
Best Practices for Taking the Powder
Timing: Take after meals (best for bloating/heaviness) �
Method: Mix with warm water or chew directly, followed by warm water �
Roast first: Dry-roast all seeds on low flame until aromatic, then grind �
Start small: Begin with ¼ tsp to assess tolerance �
Additional Lifestyle Measures
Recommended Composition Change for 70-Year-Olds
For healthy 70-year-olds, I recommend adding two ingredients to improve efficacy while reducing potential side effects:
Enhanced Digestive Powder Formula
Why This Change for Seniors?
Less ajwain — Elderly bodies are more prone to "heat" and dryness; excessive ajwain can cause discomfort �
Dry ginger (sonth) — Particularly effective for senior indigestion; boosts enzyme activity �
Hing (asafoetida) — Extremely effective for bloating/gas; increases bile and enzyme activity �
Dosage for 70-Year-Olds
¼–½ tsp after meals (start with ¼ tsp) �
With lukewarm water �
Maximum twice daily �
Precautions for Elderly
Bottom line: Your original mix is excellent. For 70-year-olds, reduce ajwain by half, add dry ginger and a pinch of hing for better enzyme stimulation and gas relief, and always start with ¼ tsp to assess tolerance. 

Migrants Claim TMC Gave Documents for Votes in West Bengal

 The situation in West Bengal has shifted dramatically following the May 2026 Assembly elections, marking a massive turning point for both state politics and border enforcement.

The newly elected BJP government, led by Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, has taken immediate administrative action after securing a landslide victory over Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). At the heart of this post-election shift is an aggressive crackdown targeting illegal immigration.

The Operational Model: "Detect, Delete, and Deport"

The new administration has formally operationalized its "Detect, Delete, and Deport" strategy to bypass prolonged legal loops and expedite the removal of undocumented individuals.

• Bypassing the Courts: Under the new framework, state police are instructed to arrest suspected illegal infiltrators and hand them over directly to the Border Security Force (BSF), who then coordinate directly with Border Guards Bangladesh for immediate deportation.

• First Holding Centers Built: The State Home Department directed all District Magistrates to build temporary "holding centers." Malda became the first district to operationalize a center, immediately housing nine suspected Bangladeshi nationals (including three women and six minors).

• Mass Mass Deletions: This administrative push follows a massive Special Intensive Revision of the state's electoral rolls, which saw 83.86 lakh (~8.4 million) voters deleted from West Bengal's registries due to falsified or dual documentation.

Political Fallout & Border Panic

The implementation of this policy has sent shockwaves through local communities and triggered a tense blame game between political factions.

• Allegations of "Votes for Documents": Videos circulated by local media channels like ABP Ananda feature alleged illegal migrants claiming that the previous TMC government facilitated local identity documents and enrolled them in state cash-handout programs—such as the Lakshmi Bhandar scheme—specifically to secure their voting bloc.

• The BSF Guarding Dispute: The role of the central border forces remains highly controversial. While the new BJP government has moved quickly to purchase and hand over 31.9 acres of land to the BSF to patch up 27 km of unfenced border gaps, the former TMC leadership has historically pushed back. Prior to the election, Mamata Banerjee explicitly blamed the Center, arguing that because the border is guarded entirely by the BSF, any systemic infiltration points to a failure of central border control rather than state-level policing.

• Voluntary Exodus at Checkpoints: The pressure from incoming eviction orders has sparked a panic-driven flight. Hundreds of suspected undocumented families—many working in informal sectors—have packed their belongings and gathered at major border points like the Hakimpur checkpost in North 24 Parganas, opting to cross back into Bangladesh voluntarily rather than face detention in the newly established holding facilities.

The Age of Strategic Ambiguity: Why Modern Wars Rarely Conclude Decisively

 

The Gulf standoff exemplifies the character of today’s “grey zone” environment: intense confrontation paired with calibrated escalation, proxy activity, and sustained strategic signalling—yet without the political drive (or operational conditions) that produce decisive, conventional war. In this setting, ambiguity is no longer incidental. It becomes an active instrument of strategy—used to shape perceptions, manage risk, and deny clear pathways to escalation.

The End of Absolute Victory: How Grey Zone Conditions Reshape 21st-Century Warfare

Over the past decade, the language of conflict has changed dramatically. Terms such as hybrid warfare, unrestricted warfare, cognitive warfare, and grey zone conflict now feature prominently in strategic debate. Yet the concept of the “grey zone” is still widely misunderstood or reduced to a narrow checklist of actions. Many analyses treat it simply as activity that falls short of conventional war—cyber intrusions, proxy warfare, economic coercion, disinformation campaigns, or incremental territorial encroachments. These elements are real, but they describe operations more than they describe the environment.

From “Grey Zone Operations” to “Grey Zone Conditions”

Recent conflicts indicate a deeper transformation. Modern warfare increasingly unfolds inside enduring grey zone conditions—an environment marked by strategic ambiguity, calibrated escalation, political restraint, technological asymmetry, and continuous narrative competition. This distinction matters.

• Grey zone operations are methods or tools.
• Grey zone conditions are the strategic setting in which conflict is conducted.

The Crumbling of Clear Binaries: Peace vs. War, Victory vs. Defeat

The traditional idea of war depends on clear binaries: peace and war, military and civilian domains, victory and defeat. That assumption is increasingly strained. Modern conflict often stops short of unconditional outcomes. States and non-state actors instead seek positional advantage and coercive leverage while avoiding escalation beyond thresholds that could become politically unmanageable. Current conditions in West Asia reflect this logic.

Ambiguity as Strategy, Not Background Noise

Under grey zone conditions, ambiguity ceases to be a by-product. It becomes a strategic capability—allowing actors to keep options open, preserve deniability, and operate in ways that complicate attribution, response planning, and political decision-making.

The Erosion of Decisive Victory

Several forces drive this shift. Nuclear deterrence discourages major powers from taking escalation risks that could spiral beyond control. Economic interdependence increases the cost of sustained conflict. The information revolution compresses decision timelines and heightens political sensitivities. Social media turns perception into an operational domain. Finally, technological diffusion has broadened access to capabilities that were once concentrated among a few major militaries.

Why Wars Now Pursue Leverage, Not Closure

As a result, outright victory is becoming harder to achieve. Contemporary conflicts are fought not only for territorial gain, but for:

• positional advantage,
• coercive leverage,
• psychological impact, and
• narrative dominance.

Strategic outcomes are often pursued in ways designed to avoid uncontrolled escalation. In other words, conflict goals increasingly target conditions rather than finality.

Case Patterns: Grey Zone Persistence Across Multiple Theatres

The Russia–Ukraine conflict illustrates how large-scale conventional combat can still remain embedded in a broader grey zone framework. Nuclear signalling, cyber operations, sanctions, information campaigns, and drone warfare all shape the conflict without producing decisive strategic dominance.

Similarly, conflicts across Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen show that military superiority does not automatically translate into political closure. Even where one side holds overwhelming kinetic advantage, decisive outcomes can remain elusive. Non-state actors may retain strategic relevance despite persistent pressure. For example, the Houthis’ relatively low-cost drone and missile capabilities have disrupted crucial maritime routes in the Red Sea, with effects that extend well beyond the immediate battlefield.

The Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict further demonstrated how drones, precision strikes, and information dominance can shift battlefield dynamics quickly—often reducing incentives or space for prolonged conventional campaigns. Increasingly, weaker actors appear willing to absorb punishment, disengage temporarily, and preserve the ability to fight again.

Technology and the Democratisation of Disruption

A key lesson from recent conflict is that technological diffusion has weakened the monopoly of military power held by major states. Precision drones, cyber tools, long-range systems, commercial surveillance, and information operations are more accessible than before.

Even if weaker actors cannot win wars conventionally, they can still deny stronger adversaries decisive victory. They can impose costs, prolong conflict, generate disruption, and influence global narratives disproportionate to their material strength.

Disengagement Without Victory: Managed Endings in an Unfinished Struggle

This produces a new pattern: disengagement without victory. Conflicts increasingly move toward uneasy pauses, ceasefires, or managed withdrawals rather than clear conclusions. Strong powers may keep tactical advantages, but struggle to secure durable political end-states. Strategic exhaustion often replaces battlefield finality—and this is likely to define future conflict trajectories.

Conflict Under Ambiguity: The Logic of Contested Normalcy

The India–China border situation reflects many features of a sophisticated grey zone environment. Declared conflict is absent, yet genuine normalcy is also missing. Military deployments, infrastructure development, tactical transgressions, diplomatic engagement, and psychological signalling occur simultaneously. Incremental pressure replaces overt escalation, while ambiguity is treated as deliberate policy rather than accidental confusion.

Here, the objective is often less about achieving territorial conquest through war and more about shaping long-term strategic perception and positional advantage.

Internal Instability as Strategic Vulnerability

Grey zone characteristics are not confined to external theatres. Internal security environments can evolve into long-term strategic vulnerabilities. Pakistan’s persistent instability—encompassing terrorism, sectarian tensions, economic fragility, and political turbulence—demonstrates how internal disorder can generate enduring strategic consequences beyond domestic governance.

Coexistence of Competition and Restraint

A defining characteristic of grey zone conditions is the simultaneous presence of competition and restraint. Actors may behave aggressively while managing escalation thresholds with care. Ambiguity provides flexibility, deniability, and diplomatic space—enabling states and non-state actors alike to pursue objectives without triggering unrestricted war.

The Psychology of Strategic Frustration

Grey zone conditions create distinct challenges for major powers. Military superiority often creates expectations of rapid political outcomes, but prolonged ambiguity blocks closure. Stronger states may find themselves caught between escalation they cannot fully control and disengagement that feels politically unsatisfactory.

This produces strategic frustration. Under sustained pressure, major powers may resort to disproportionate responses, diplomatic overreach, or escalatory signalling that erodes legitimacy and public support. The inability to secure decisive outcomes despite overwhelming capabilities becomes both a strategic and psychological burden. Modern conflict increasingly resembles a contest of endurance rather than annihilation.

Societies as Battlespaces: Expanding the Battlefield

Another major transformation is the expanding nature of the battlespace. Modern conflict increasingly targets public morale, economic continuity, political cohesion, and informational credibility. Societies become operational domains, not just populations.

Infrastructure, communication networks, energy grids, financial systems, and public perception can all be disrupted or manipulated. Narrative management therefore operates alongside military operations as a tool of strategy.

Resilience as a Strategic Advantage

In this environment, resilience becomes central. States that preserve social cohesion, economic stability, and public confidence under prolonged stress are likely to hold a strategic advantage in future conflicts.

Implications for India: Beyond Conventional Preparedness

For India, these developments carry clear implications. India’s strategic environment includes contested borders, maritime competition, cyber vulnerabilities, information challenges, and complex internal security dynamics. Future readiness must therefore extend beyond conventional military capability.

A whole-of-nation approach will become increasingly necessary—integrating technological innovation, strategic communication, economic resilience, border infrastructure development, intelligence coordination, and societal preparedness. Military power remains indispensable, but it will increasingly function alongside diplomatic, informational, technological, and economic instruments within a connected battlespace.

The Line of Control and Evolving Grey Zone Dynamics

The Line of Control and the wider security environment in Jammu & Kashmir also reflect key elements of grey zone evolution. Unlike the early years of the millennium—when terrorism and infiltration dominated the landscape more visibly—the environment today is shaped more by calibrated escalation, information influence, surveillance technologies, drone-enabled smuggling, proxy facilitation, and persistent psychological contestation.

The emphasis has gradually shifted from sustained high-intensity violence toward attempts to maintain strategic disruption, sustain narrative relevance, and cultivate intermittent instability below the threshold of wider conventional escalation.

The Strategic Challenge: Recognising Conditions, Not Just Events

The key challenge is not merely to respond to isolated grey zone operations, but to recognise the emergence of enduring grey zone conditions as a defining strategic reality. Failing to do so risks misreading the conflict logic and responding with the wrong tools at the wrong time.

Advantage Without Victory: The New Measure of Success

Decisive wars that produce unambiguous political outcomes may not disappear entirely, but they are becoming less common. The future is likely to be shaped by persistent competition conducted below, around, and sometimes within the threshold of conventional conflict.

Strategic ambiguity is no longer an exception—it is rapidly becoming the dominant context. Success in this environment will not depend only on winning battles. It will depend on sustaining resilience, managing escalation, preserving legitimacy, and maintaining strategic advantage amid prolonged uncertainty—while retaining the capacity to recover, adapt, and re-engage when required.

Conclusion: Enduring Competition as the New Strategic Continuum

Future conflict may therefore be defined less by decisive victory at culmination and more by the ability to endure, outlast, and shape outcomes over an extended continuum of confrontation. In the emerging grey zone battlespace, advantage without decisive victory may increasingly become the defining measure of strategic success.

 

WARFARE OF 21 CENTURY OR TODAYS WAR FARE

 The age of strategic ambiguity is redefining how modern conflicts begin, persist, and end. While the vocabulary of conflict now frequently includes terms like hybrid warfare, unrestricted warfare, cognitive warfare, and grey zone conflict, the practical understanding of the “grey zone” remains uneven. The current Gulf standoff reflects the core feature of this environment: intense confrontation paired with calibrated escalation, proxy activity, and strategic signalling—yet without a clear pursuit of decisive, conventional war.

This paper argues that contemporary warfare is increasingly shaped less by discrete “grey zone operations” and more by the emergence of enduring “grey zone conditions” that determine how conflict is conducted and how strategic outcomes are pursued.

2) Literature Gap

Existing analyses commonly interpret the grey zone primarily as a collection of activities below the threshold of conventional war—such as cyber intrusions, proxy warfare, economic coercion, disinformation campaigns, or incremental territorial pressure. While these elements help describe tactics, they often fail to capture the deeper transformation visible in recent conflicts.

Two limitations follow:

1. Conceptual reductionism: The grey zone is treated as a toolbox rather than a strategic environment.
2. Analytical incompleteness: Many frameworks understate how ambiguity, restraint, and narrative competition shape decision-making, escalation dynamics, and political end-states.

Accordingly, the literature tends to describe “what actors do,” but less consistently explains “what conditions make these actions strategically rational and politically sustainable.”

3) Argument

The central claim is that twenty-first-century conflict is increasingly embedded in enduring grey zone conditions. These conditions are characterised by strategic ambiguity, calibrated escalation, political restraint, technological asymmetry, and continuous narrative competition.

3.1 Operations vs. Conditions

This paper distinguishes between:

• Grey zone operations: methods used to exert pressure (e.g., cyber attacks, proxy support, disinformation, coercive measures).
• Grey zone conditions: the strategic setting within which conflicts unfold (including escalation management, deniability incentives, and political constraints).

Under these conditions, ambiguity becomes an instrument of strategy, not merely a by-product of limited warfare.

3.2 Why Decisive Victory Is Eroding

Several structural factors drive this shift: nuclear deterrence reduces incentives for uncontrolled escalation; economic interdependence increases the costs of prolonged conflict; information speed compresses decision timelines and heightens political sensitivities; social media and information ecosystems turn perception into an operational domain; and technological diffusion democratises access to disruptive capabilities.

Consequently, wars increasingly target positional advantage, coercive leverage, psychological effects, and narrative dominance, rather than unconditional political closure. This is consistent with patterns of disengagement without victory—where conflicts pause, stall, or de-escalate without producing definitive end-states.

3.3 Evidence Patterns Across Conflict Theatres

Recent conflicts across multiple regions show that even where one side retains conventional superiority, political decisive outcomes may remain elusive. Large conventional campaigns can still function inside a broader grey zone framework through sanctions, cyber activity, information warfare, and signalling. Likewise, drone-enabled and precision-enabled disruption can reshape battlefield equations quickly, often encouraging weaker actors to absorb punishment, preserve capability, and avoid protracted, conventional destruction.

3.4 Social and Psychological Dimensions

A further development is that the battlespace expands beyond armies into societies. Conflicts increasingly aim at public morale, economic continuity, political cohesion, and informational credibility. Narrative management operates alongside kinetic operations, making resilience—social, economic, and informational—an operational variable.

3.5 Grey Zone Psychology and Major-Power Constraints

Grey zone conditions also generate strategic frustration among major powers. Military superiority produces expectations of rapid political closure, but ambiguity can deny closure and trap states in escalation dilemmas: either escalate beyond control or disengage without satisfying political objectives. This makes modern conflict closer to endurance and calibration than to annihilation and decisive culmination.

4) Implications

4.1 Implications for Strategic Understanding

The primary implication is methodological: policymakers and analysts must treat the grey zone not only as a set of tactics, but as an enduring strategic environment. Misreading events as isolated “operations” risks responding with tools suited to conventional conflict rather than to escalation management, ambiguity navigation, and narrative contestation.

4.2 Implications for India

For India, the strategic environment includes contested borders, maritime competition, cyber vulnerabilities, information challenges, and complex internal security dynamics. Preparedness therefore cannot rest solely on conventional military capability. A whole-of-nation approach is increasingly necessary, integrating:

• technological innovation,
• strategic communication and narrative resilience,
• economic and infrastructural robustness,
• intelligence coordination and early warning,
• and societal preparedness to sustain cohesion under prolonged stress.

The Line of Control and the broader Jammu & Kashmir security environment further illustrate grey zone evolution through calibrated escalation, information influence, surveillance-enabled disruptions, drone-adjacent facilitation, proxy dynamics, and ongoing psychological contestation. Here, conflict emphasis may shift from sustained high-intensity violence toward intermittent instability designed to preserve strategic disruption below wider conventional escalation thresholds.

5) Conclusion

Decisive wars producing unambiguous political outcomes may not vanish entirely, but they are increasingly less common. Future conflict is likely to be shaped by persistent competition conducted below, around, and sometimes within the threshold of conventional war. Strategic ambiguity is steadily becoming the dominant context rather than an exception.

Accordingly, success may be measured less by decisive victory at culmination and more by the capacity to endure, manage escalation, preserve legitimacy, and sustain strategic advantage through prolonged uncertainty. In the emerging grey zone battlespace, advantage without decisive victory may become the defining measure of strategic success.

STATE OF INDIAN ECONOMY DR MONTEK SINGH AHLUWALIA

 In this exclusive interview on Business Today, Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former Chairperson of the Planning Commission, shares a critical perspective on India's current economic landscape. He warns that the country faces severe global headwinds and outlines why immediate, transparent reforms are essential.

Here is a summary of the key insights from his discussion:

1. Fuel Prices and Currency Depreciation

• Inevitable Price Hikes: Dr. Ahluwalia agrees with the government's decision to pass fuel price increases onto consumers [00:34]. He explains that shielding the public completely would drastically worsen the fiscal deficit [01:31].

• The Rupee's Slide: He supports the decision to let the Indian Rupee float and depreciate according to market conditions [06:18], viewing it as a necessary adjustment when foreign capital inflows dry up.

2. A Call for Policy Transparency

• Administered Pricing: He highlights that despite claims of dismantling the "administered price mechanism," fuel pricing in India remains effectively controlled by the government [02:42]. He urges for greater transparency so citizens understand the true economic costs [02:49].

• The Energy and Fertilizer Crisis: India imports 80% of its oil, meaning it cannot pretend to be isolated from global energy stress [10:00]. Additionally, he points out that heavily subsidizing fertilizers (pricing them at just 10% of import costs) is unsustainable and leads to smuggling across borders [10:45].

3. Investment Bottlenecks & Trade

• Investor Uncertainty: A major structural weakness is low private investment and foreign direct investment (FDI) outflows [04:22, 05:19]. He notes that the termination of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) in 2015 has left international investors anxious about legal protections in India [07:50].

• Missed Trade Opportunities: While praising recent Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with the UK and EU [06:41], he believes India missed out on crucial East Asian growth by avoiding regional pacts. He recommends India seek entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) [07:02].

4. Turning Crisis into an Opportunity for Reform

• The 1991 Parallel: Drawing from his experience during India's landmark 1991 balance of payments crisis, Dr. Ahluwalia states that economic stress should be leveraged to push tough structural changes [11:23]. He notes that in 1991, the heavy lifting was done before the budget, and the budget speech was simply used to explain the rationale [13:55].

• External Expertise: He advises the government not to rely solely on internal bureaucracies or ministries to craft policies [17:13]. Instead, they should bring in fresh, outside ideas through expert committees and consultation with top private-sector leaders to minimize intrusive, old-fashioned regulatory systems [17:27, 18:44].

5. Fiscal Discipline & Federal Risks

• State Deficits: He expresses deep concern over the "freebie culture" and rising revenue deficits at the subnational (state) level [19:11]. He warns that a loss of discipline here can precipitate a macro crisis and insists that the central government strictly cap state borrowing limits [19:41].

Conclusion

Dr. Ahluwalia acknowledges successful legacy reforms like the scale-up of Aadhaar and the introduction of GST [15:11]. However, he notes that "holding back" on further simplifications (like creating a single GST rate or pushing through promised privatizations) hurts growth [15:44, 16:27]. His ultimate takeaway for the government is that it must move past slogans, embrace constructive criticism, and "walk the talk" on economic transformation [21:27, 22:04].

स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर राष्ट्रीय स्मारक शौर्य पुरस्कार 2026 मेजर शंतनू घाटपांडे,5/9 GURKHA RIFLES -SENA MEDAL SHAURYA- यांना भारत नाट्य मंदिर पुणे येथे 30 मे 2026 ला सकाळी नऊ वाजता सगळ्यांनी यावे

 सबसे पहले, मैं स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर राष्ट्रीय स्मारक का हृदय से आभार व्यक्त करती हूँ कि उन्होंने मेरे पति, मेजर शंतनु घाटपांडे (5/9 गोरखा राइफल्स), सेना मेडल (वीरता), को “स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर शौर्य पुरस्कार – 2026” के योग्य माना।

स्वातंत्र्यवीर विनायक दामोदर सावरकर जी के नाम से जुड़ा यह सम्मान प्राप्त होना हमारे लिए विशेष गौरव की बात है। सावरकर जी ने राष्ट्रप्रेम, शौर्य, कर्तव्य और राष्ट्रीय एकता को जीवन में सर्वोच्च स्थान दिया। उनकी दूरदृष्टि, देशभक्ति और मातृभूमि के प्रति समर्पण आज भी देश की अनेक पीढ़ियों को प्रेरणा देता है।

स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर राष्ट्रीय स्मारक द्वारा प्रतिवर्ष राष्ट्रसेवा, शौर्य और कर्तव्यनिष्ठा के लिए भारतीय सैनिकों को सम्मानित किया जाता है। ऐसे प्रतिष्ठित सम्मान से उनका नाम जुड़ना हमारे परिवार के लिए अत्यंत सम्मान और गर्व का विषय है।

उनकी तैनाती मणिपुर के एक अत्यंत संवेदनशील क्षेत्र में कॉलम कमांडर के रूप में थी। अक्टूबर 2023 में वहाँ के कुछ गाँवों पर भारी हथियारों से लैस उग्रवादियों द्वारा हमला किया गया। स्थिति अत्यंत गंभीर थी और निर्दोष नागरिकों का जीवन खतरे में था।

4 अक्टूबर 2023 को उग्रवादियों ने एक गाँव पर अंधाधुंध गोलीबारी करते हुए हमला किया। ऐसे समय में उन्होंने और उनकी टीम ने अपनी व्यक्तिगत सुरक्षा की परवाह किए बिना तुरंत घटनास्थल की ओर प्रस्थान किया। भीषण गोलीबारी और तनावपूर्ण परिस्थितियों के बीच गाँव में प्रवेश कर प्रभावी जवाबी कार्रवाई की, जिससे उग्रवादियों को पीछे हटने पर मजबूर होना पड़ा। इसके बाद ग्रामीणों को सुरक्षित स्थानों तक पहुँचाया गया।

इसके कुछ दिनों बाद, 7 अक्टूबर 2023 को उग्रवादियों ने गाँव को जलाने के उद्देश्य से फिर से हमला किया। उस समय भी उन्होंने अद्वितीय साहस और नेतृत्व का परिचय देते हुए अपनी टुकड़ी का नेतृत्व किया तथा स्थिति को नियंत्रण में लाया।

इन अभियानों के दौरान 200 से अधिक लोगों के प्राण बचाए जा सके और अनेक परिवार सुरक्षित रहे।

इसके अतिरिक्त, उनके नेतृत्व में महत्वपूर्ण अभियान चलाए गए, जिनमें उग्रवादियों द्वारा छिपाकर रखे गए भारी मात्रा में हथियार और गोला-बारूद बरामद किए गए। इससे आगे होने वाली हिंसा को रोकने में महत्वपूर्ण सहायता मिली।

उनके उत्कृष्ट साहस, वीरता और नेतृत्व के लिए उन्हें स्वतंत्रता दिवस 2024 के अवसर पर “सेना मेडल (वीरता)” से सम्मानित किया गया।

मेरे लिए सबसे भावुक करने वाली बात यह है कि उन्होंने कभी भी इन अभियानों की कठिन परिस्थितियों या अपने ऊपर मंडरा रहे खतरे के बारे में घर पर विस्तार से चर्चा नहीं की। भारतीय सेना के अधिकांश सैनिकों की तरह उन्होंने भी इसे केवल अपना कर्तव्य माना। हमें उनके कार्य की वास्तविक गंभीरता और वीरता का एहसास तब हुआ, जब उन्हें यह वीरता पुरस्कार प्रदान किए जाने की घोषणा हुई।

एक सैनिक के जीवन में कर्तव्य सदैव सर्वोच्च होता है। परिस्थितियाँ कितनी भी कठिन क्यों न हों, उसका उद्देश्य केवल देश और देशवासियों की रक्षा करना होता है।

आज प्राप्त यह सम्मान केवल एक पदक नहीं है, बल्कि भारतीय सेना के मूल्यों — शौर्य, अनुशासन, समर्पण और निःस्वार्थ सेवा — का सम्मान है। यह सम्मान केवल एक व्यक्ति का नहीं, बल्कि उन सभी सैनिकों और उनके परिवारों का भी है, जो शांतिपूर्वक और निस्वार्थ भाव से राष्ट्रसेवा में लगे रहते हैं।

आज इस मंच पर खड़े होकर स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर जी के विचारों का स्मरण करना अपने आप में सौभाग्य की बात है। उनके नाम से जुड़ा यह सम्मान हमारे परिवार के लिए केवल गर्व का विषय नहीं, बल्कि एक प्रेरणा भी है, जो हमें आगे भी अपने कर्तव्यों और जिम्मेदारियों के प्रति समर्पित रहने की शक्ति देती रहेगी।

अंत में, मैं केवल इतना कहना चाहूँगी —

एक सैनिक के लिए राष्ट्रसेवा केवल उसका कर्तव्य नहीं, बल्कि उसका संकल्प होता है।

वह हर परिस्थिति में, हर चुनौती के बीच, अपने देश और देशवासियों की रक्षा को सर्वोच्च मानता है।

आज प्राप्त यह सम्मान हम सभी के for लिए गर्व का क्षण है, लेकिन इसके साथ यह हमें और अधिक जिम्मेदारी, समर्पण और राष्ट्रप्रेम के मार्ग पर आगे बढ़ने की प्रेरणा भी देता है।

मैं पुनः स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर राष्ट्रीय स्मारक का हृदय से आभार व्यक्त करती हूँ कि उन्होंने उनके कार्य, वीरता और नेतृत्व को इस प्रतिष्ठित सम्मान के योग्य माना तथा इस सम्मान से सम्मानित किया।

जय हिंद।

वंदे मातरम्।

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa7gT7P1eh4

Social Media & Investing: The Rise of Finfluencers - Friend or Foe?

 

1. It Started with a Scroll   Rohan was just killing time. It was a Sunday morning - the kind where you wake up with no real plan, pour yourself tea, and fall into the scroll. Instagram, YouTube, back to Instagram. Then a video stopped him. A guy his age, maybe younger, sat in what looked like a very expensive apartment, speaking straight into the camera with the calm confidence of someone who had figured out something the rest of the world hadn’t. "I turned ₹50,000 into ₹4 lakh in eight months," the guy said. "And I'm going to tell you exactly how." Rohan watched the whole thing. Then he watched two more videos from the same creator. By afternoon, he had opened a brokerage account, transferred money from his savings, and bought shares in a company he had never heard of two hours earlier. He didn't think of himself as impulsive. He had a stable job, a budget he mostly stuck to, and a healthy distrust of get-rich-quick schemes. And yet - here he was. If you've never had a moment like Rohan's, you almost certainly know someone who has. Because this is the story of our time: the age of the finfluencer.   2. Who Exactly Is a Finfluencer?   A mashup of "finance" and "influencer" - but what it describes is very real and very powerful. These are everyday people who have built large followings on YouTube, Instagram, X, and Telegram by talking about money: stocks, mutual funds, crypto, budgeting, and real estate. Some have millions of followers. Some are teenagers. Very few are registered with SEBI as financial advisers. In the last five years, they have quietly become the primary source of financial education for an entire generation. That is both an extraordinary achievement and an extraordinary risk.   3. How Did We Get Here?   To understand how this happened, you have to understand what came before. For most middle-class families in India, “investing” meant one of three things: a fixed deposit at the bank, a life insurance policy sold by the family agent, or a hot tip on some small-cap stock from a relative. Real financial literacy - the kind that explains asset allocation, compounding, index funds, and risk tolerance - was either locked inside expensive wealth management firms that didn’t cater to small clients or buried in textbooks nobody reads. Then smartphones arrived. Then cheap data. Then social media. Suddenly, a 24-year-old in Pune could sit in his bedroom, explain what a SIP is in plain Hindi, get two million views, and do more for financial awareness in six minutes than a decade of government campaigns had managed. And to their credit, many finfluencers did exactly that. They taught people what mutual funds are. They showed young earners why starting a SIP at 22 is so much more powerful than starting at 32. They made the stock market feel less like a casino run by suits and more like something a regular person could understand and participate in. This is not a small thing. The democratization of financial curiosity has real, positive downstream effects - more people checking their credit scores, more people starting SIPs, and more people actually reading their insurance policies. The medium - social media - is not the villain. The problem is what came next.   4. The Dark Side of the Scroll   As audiences grew, so did the incentives to exploit them. The platform algorithm is brutally simple: content that generates emotion gets pushed to more people - fear of missing out, the thrill of a secret, the fantasy of fast money. A calm, well-researched video explaining why index funds outperform active stock-picking over a 20-year horizon might get 8,000 views. A video titled “The one stock your bank doesn’t want you to own” gets 8 million views. Creators picked up on the trend. They followed the algorithm. And a subset of them discovered something: if you have a large enough audience and you recommend a specific small-cap stock, your followers buy it, the price rises, and if you already own that stock - you quietly sell into the rally and pocket the difference. Your followers are left holding a stock you no longer believe in, at a price you helped inflate. This is called a pump-and-dump scheme. It is illegal. And it has happened repeatedly, affecting real people who trusted a face on their phone.   5. Six Months Later   Six months after that Sunday morning, Rohan checked his portfolio. The stock he had bought was down 47%. He went back to the creator’s channel - the guy was now enthusiastically recommending something else entirely. The original video had thousands of comments from people asking where the promised returns were. Not a single reply. Rohan lost about ₹18,000. He could absorb that. But he knew someone from his office who had invested ₹2.5 lakh - nearly three months of savings - based on the same video. That person was not talking about it. Here is the uncomfortable truth about financial content on the internet: the creator bears no downside from being wrong. You do.   6. How to Tell the Difference   Not every finfluencer is running a scam. Many are genuinely trying to educate. The challenge is that, on a phone screen, the honest educator and the operator look identical. So how do you tell the difference? a) Specific stock recommendations A legitimate financial educator talks about concepts - how to evaluate a balance sheet, what a P/E ratio means, why diversification matters. An operator names a stock, gives an entry price, and promises a target. b) Disclosure Is the creator being paid? Do they own the stock they're recommending? The absence of disclosure is not an oversight - it is a choice. c) Urgency "Limited window." "Don't miss this." "Act before Thursday." Markets do not have closing windows. Urgency is manufactured. d) Understanding test Can you explain the investment to someone else? If not, you don't understand it well enough to invest in it.   7. The Real Lesson   The rise of finfluencers is not just about bad actors on the internet. It is about a gap. For too long, real financial education was inaccessible - too technical, too expensive, too gatekept. Social media filled that gap with something more engaging, more relatable, and sometimes, more dangerous. The answer is not to dismiss every financial creator as a fraud. The answer is to become a more discerning audience. Watch to learn vocabulary. Watch to spark curiosity. Watch to understand concepts that you can verify elsewhere - with a SEBI-registered adviser, your own research, or credible sources. But the moment a video makes you want to open your brokerage app and buy something you hadn't even considered that morning - pause. That feeling is not insight. That feeling is exactly what someone engineered it to be. Rohan learned this the expensive way. You don't have to!