1.India’s GDP blitz at 8.2% in FY24

The Indian economy expanded at a blistering 7.8% in the three months through March, surpassing expectations and pushing up the growth rate for fiscal year 2024 to 8.2%, according to official data released on Friday.

This robust expansion was propelled by significant gains in the manufacturing, construction, mining, and services sectors.

The strong showing also led to India retaining its crown as the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

2.Agnibaan’s test flight shows Indian aerospace is done playing catch-up

The successful test flight of the Agnibaan launch vehicle heralds a new phase in India’s aerospace journey. This technology demonstration has massive implications for the aerospace ecosystem and could open the door to explosive growth.  

The test flight is a validation of policy changes made in the past two years that have stoked the ambitions of India’s private sector. It is also a validation of ISRO’s working process – the space agency draws up design specifications, issues tenders for projects, and shares infrastructure and intellectual property – and shows India’s space programme, the foundation of which was laid by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is maturing well. 

Agnikul Cosmos, the company that designed Agnibaan, is one of ISRO’s “babies" – several hundred startups that have entered the aerospace sector on the back of the aerospace policy. As a result of ISRO’s generosity and policy changes freeing the sector, India’s aerospace ecosystem now boasts a wide range of skills that it can deploy without regulatory constraints.

Agnikul Cosmos has just demonstrated that it is no longer a matter of playing catch-up as the Agnibaan launch vehicle is cutting-edge in terms of technology. The engine is semi-cryogenic, meaning it uses a mixture of extremely cold fuel (liquid oxygen) and normal-temperature fuel (kerosene or aviation turbine fuel).

Just as impressively, the fabrication is done through single-shell 3D printing – a global first. 3D printing works by extruding material from the printer to create a three-dimensional object, just like a normal printer extrudes ink to create an image or a text document. It can be used to make guns, cars and houses and, as Agnibaan has just demonstrated, space launch vehicles.

3.India’s silver economy: Far-off prospect or underserved segment?

India’s population demography is changing and there is a new class of affluent senior citizens showing strength in numbers and spending power. Yet, this segment remains largely absent from mainstream marketing efforts, particularly in categories like fashion, beauty, durables and automobiles. While there are some ads that target this segment, they remain few and far between.

Guess the fastest growing demographic in India today? If you said Gen Z, you’d be wrong. It’s actually Gen X — the soon-to-be-silver segment. Currently, senior citizens, aged 60 years and above, constitute just over 10% of the Indian population, approximately 150 million individuals. But projections by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) suggest that this segment could swell to 340 million by 2050, encompassing 21% of the total population and 17% of the world’s elderly population.

Yet, brands, marketers and the advertising industry in general continue to overlook this segment writes Shannon Tellis in ET’s Brand Equity.

4.Rising summer temperatures push power demand in India driven by rapidly rising cooling equipment (air-conditioners and air coolers)

Weather advisories have warned of severe heatwave conditions across most of northern India. Rising summer temperatures have pushed power demand, with numbers rising closer to the power ministry’s projected peak of 260 gigawatts (Gw) this summer. 

Increased use of cooling equipment during heatwaves is said to be a key reason, although only around a quarter of households own air conditioners or air coolers in India. This is expected to multiply in the coming years and decades.

Much of the rising demand is met by thermal power. It accounted for more than three quarters of the electricity generated as of March 2024, similar to previous years. Reports indicate adequate coal stocks to meet demand unlike in 2023. India added over 12,000 megawatts (Mw) of installed thermal capacity since March 2020. However, major power capacity additions are in the renewable segment where the addition has been nearly 57,000 Mw.

The intermittent nature of renewable energy can affect grid stability. Nuclear power is a clean alternative to the steady power generation, currently provided by thermal power plants. India has been pushing to add more nuclear power, but the output remains low. 

The incremental investment in thermal power has largely come from government sources. Private sector additions have been flat since 2020.

5.Trump Criminal Conviction

A New York jury yesterday found former President Donald Trump guilty of all 34 counts related to falsifying business records in the hush-money trial against him. The news makes him the first former US president convicted of a crime. 

The case against Trump related to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The crux of the case rested on whether Trump altered records of $130K in hush money payments to make them appear legitimate and help his chances in the election. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the trial as politically motivated and is expected to appeal. 

The conviction does not preclude Trump from running for office. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, four days before the Republican National Committee is set to formally nominate Trump for president. While Trump faces fines and a maximum sentence of up to four years in prison, an estimated one in 10 people convicted of similar charges is imprisoned.

Donald Trump’s conviction over a hush-money payment to an adult film actress complicated his already-fraught path back to the White House. The unprecedented ruling against a former US president played out in predictable ways among Republican (they denounced verdict) and Democratic partisans (who applauded verdict).

But it was nevertheless likely to reverberate among swing voters, giving those “who don’t much like [Joe] Biden … an emphatic, unambiguous reminder of why they don’t like Trump,” Politico’s global editor-in-chief wrote, while Semafor’s Washington bureau chief noted “low-engagement voters look kije the main characters in this election.” One group appeared unmoved by Trump’s legal travails, though: Billionaires are lining up behind the Republican candidate, with one saying, “This verdict will have less than zero impact on my support.”

As Der Spiegel’s chief Washington correspondent put it, the ruling is unlikely to derail Trump’s campaign, and with opinion polls so far largely unmoved by his legal troubles, heads of countries such as Russia and Israel — both leading conflicts in which US policy may be decisive — appear to be waiting for Trump returning to office, The Washington Post wrote.

In Foreign Affairs, a former Australian premier advised world leaders that the ex-president would, eventually, show respect for strength and directness, but warned that “only the willfully deluded could imagine that a second Trump administration would be less volatile and alarming than the first.”

6.Amazon to expand drone delivery service after clearing FAA hurdle

Amazon cleared a key regulatory hurdle that will enable it to expand drone deliveries.The FAA has allowed Amazon to fly drones out of sight of a ground spotter, enabling it to fly farther distances.

Amazon’s drone program, called Prime Air, has struggled to get off the ground since Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for the service more than a decade ago.

7.How Actors Remember Their Lines

After a recent theater performance, I remained in the audience as the actors assembled on stage to discuss the current play and the upcoming production that they were rehearsing. Because each actor had many lines to remember, my curiosity led me to ask a question they frequently hear: “How do you learn all of those lines?”

Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.

Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?”

Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorised text. In his book “Acting in Film,” actor Michael Caine described this process well:

You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.

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8.NHS patients in England to be offered trials for world-first cancer vaccine

Thousands of patients in England are to be fast-tracked into groundbreaking trials of personalised cancer vaccines in a revolutionary world-first NHS “matchmaking” scheme to save lives.

The gamechanging jabs, which aim to provide a permanent cure, are custom-built for each patient in just a few weeks. They are tailored to the individual’s tumours and work by telling their body to hunt and kill any cancer cells and prevent the disease from coming back.

Under the new scheme, the first of its kind in the world, patients who meet the eligibility criteria and agree to have a blood test and sample of their cancer tissue analysed will gain immediate access to clinical trials for the new vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn of treatments for cancer.

Research into cancer vaccines is at an early stage, but trials have already shown they can be effective at killing off any remaining tumour cells after surgery and dramatically cut the risk of cancer returning.

The NHS has enrolled dozens of patients on to its scheme, the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, with thousands more to be enlisted at 30 NHS sites across England. The first trials are expected to focus on colorectal, skin, lung, bladder, pancreatic and kidney cancer, officials said, but other forms of the disease could be added in future.