Arvind’s Newsletter

1.India adds a record 18 GW Renewable Energy capacity in FY24

18.48 GW is how much renewable energy capacity India added in 2023-24. This is a record high, up by 21% from the capacity added in the previous year. But it isn’t enough to meet the country’s target of 500 gigawatt (GW) by 2030.

According to industry experts, the country needs 50 GW added every year for the next six years to meet the target. As of now, the country has a total renewable energy capacity of about 190 GW, including large hydropower projects.  

2.Made-in-India Teslas, to be powered by electronics from Tata Electronics

Teslas will sport key vehicle control elements from Tata Electronics, in a deal that fuels the Tatas’ ascent in electronics, and helps the EV giant localise its cars quicker.

Tata Electronics will make parts such as printed circuit board assemblies that will go into Tesla’s battery management systems, motor controller units and door controls, among others, the people cited above said on condition of anonymity. The Tata group company is looking to build a new facility for the purpose, and has started buying manufacturing equipment.

The Tata Electronics deal is a deviation for Tesla, which has typically relied on international partners such as Foxconn and Jabil Inc. for vehicle electronics. While Foxconn and Jabil haven’t yet tied up with Tesla for the India project, an arrangement in the future cannot be ruled out.

3.Reliance Industries' Jio Financial Services, announced that it has entered into joint venture with US-based BlackRock for the expansion of wealth management and broking services in India.

In an exchange filing, the financial entity said it has signed a 50:50 joint venture focused on wealth management endeavours, which includes launching a wealth management company and subsequently establishing a brokerage firm in India.

4.Billionaire Gautam Adani is setting-up a global think-tank named Chintan Research Foundation with a Rs 100 crore ($12 million) seed capital, reported the Financial Times.

The New Delhi-based institution, will focus on areas including climate change, the energy transition and international politics. It will launch as early as next month with Rs1bn ($12mn) of “seed capital” from Adani’s eponymous infrastructure-focused conglomerate, according to people familiar with the matter.

The institute will eventually look to attract outside funding and expand with branches in major Indian cities, including Mumbai and Bengaluru, as well as overseas in Washington and possibly London.

Headhunters have been appointed to hire a chair and international advisory board for the proposed independent research institute, with the Adani Group’s involvement kept at “arm’s length”, said one of the people. Adani wants to create a “world-class think-tank” that can help frame research and narratives “with the global south in mind”, they added. “It will be very professionally run.”

5.Vision problems could indicate that someone has a higher risk of developing dementia.

A new study could predict which patients get Alzheimer’s 12 years before their diagnosis.

6.Iran’s attack on Israel provoked worried responses from Asia, with some taking potshots at the United Nations.

Both Japan and India condemned the attack, while calling on Israel and Iran to resolve the dispute diplomatically,Nikkei Asia reported. China’s response, meanwhile, was more layered: Its foreign ministry expressed “concern” about the escalation, while state tabloid the Global Times singled out the United Nations and its “failure” to “condemn Israel’s attacks on Iranian diplomatic facilities,” in a now-deleted X post. Pakistan — which recently exchanged airstrikes with Iran — also condemned the U.N. for its inability “to fulfil its responsibilities of maintaining international peace and security.”

7. All We Imagine as Light, is the first Indian film in 30 years to compete for Cannes’ top Palme d’Or Award.

The Indo-French production follows the story of a Malayali nurse’s escape to a seaside town after “an unexpected gift” from her estranged husband.

Writer-director Payal Kapadia will be competing for the prestigious prize against directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Yórgos Lánthimos this May. Only one Indian film, Neecha Nagar, has won the top honor at Cannes — back in 1946. “Cracking Cannes main competition for an Indian film is so rare an event that it happens only once (if at all) in the life of a generation,” an Indian filmmaker remarked.

8.The new science of Death, Alex Blasdel in The Guardian

One of the wonders of being alive in the modern world is that your personal mental model of the world around you is constantly being challenged as new insights and information emerges. This long read in The Guardian tells us that the line between life and death is not as binary as we thought it was. What Alex Blasdel’s thought-provoking essay helped us understand is captured by the following excerpt from his piece:

“In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest. (It is different from a heart attack, in which there is a blockage in a heart that’s still pumping.) Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.

For almost all people at all times in history, cardiac arrest was basically the end of the line. That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques, and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.

As more and more people were resuscitated, scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.

It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care. In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.” Read on