DHAXIT
Winston Churchill did many horrible things, drinking scotch at breakfast and starving Indians among them, but he had a way with words. Take his line about democracy being “the worst form of government except all the other ones,” a sentiment he likely stood by after losing to Clement Attlee in the post-war election. One can sympathise with his cynicism when watching the daily proceedings in both Houses of Parliament, which resemble a very expensive Bigg Boss episode (Rs 2.5 lakh per minute). Yet sometimes, there’s a twist worth the price of admission—like the sudden resignation of Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar, which has left Delhi’s power corridors scratching their heads.
As today’s TOI edit notes: “Dhankhar’s abrupt exit goes against the decorum expected from a constitutional office. His frequent barbs at the judiciary make his own theatrical departure ironic. Whatever his reasons, the consensus is clear: ‘health’ wasn’t it.”
Even the farewell felt unusually frosty, as if HR was sending off an intern who spent three months just watching reels.
PM Modi’s X post read: “Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar ji has had many opportunities to serve our country in various capacities, including as Vice-President of India. Wishing him good health.” The PM’s farewell message to Dhankhar is as terse as it could be. West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, his old sparring partner from his Governor days, couldn’t resist suggesting his health looked just fine.
Speculation is rife: Was it his nod to the opposition’s motion on Justice Vikas Nath Varma, his constant judiciary-baiting, or just a flair for drama that made him script his own exit?
Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha is poised for a new presiding officer. The NDA commands 134 seats (plus 10 nominated members) versus the opposition’s 106, but the absence of a Vice President—who doubles as House Chairman—could turn routine procedural votes into an interesting sport. For now, the Deputy Chairman holds the gavel, lest the House descend into prime-time chaos.
Speaking of Churchill, his predecessor Neville Chamberlain will forever be memed for declaring “peace in our time” after cutting a deal with Hitler. But it’s his elder brother, Nobel laureate Sir Austen Chamberlain, who left us the perfect line for moments like this- even if he called it an old Chinese curse that never existed: “May we live in interesting times.” If Dhankhar was aiming for his own “peace for our time” moment, he’s certainly made the times interesting.
Ozzy Out
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners – the best movie to come out so far this year – begins with the line: “There are legends of people born with a gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death.” The reference is to the young Blues musician Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore whose music could summon the undead. Ozzy Osbourne too, was born with the gift of making music so true, it could pierce the veil between life and death.
Two weeks ago, when Ozzy, perched on a giant black throne like some deranged medieval king, growled, “Let’s go crazy one last f**** time,” before launching into Paranoid, it felt like theatre. Now it feels like prophecy. On July 22, John Michael Osbourne – yes, he had a perfectly ordinary name before the bat-biting and ant-snorting – left this world, but not before reinventing what sound, fury, and darkness could mean.
Ozzy’s voice was never operatic, never “clean.” It was a cracked cathedral bell, wailing raw truth. With Black Sabbath, he didn’t just sing; he conjured fear. When he said go nuts, the audience went nuts. He showed that melody and menace could exist. He showed the world that rock could be the angst of the faceless. His voice aged not like wine but like rusted steel: jagged, unyielding, unforgettable.
Many years ago, a man from Liverpool – murdered by a crazy fanatic for not living his life according to the ethos of a popular song that echoed the Communist anthem – wrote another song titled Working Class Hero, which mocked society for forcing people to conform to its standards. Ozzy, ever the working-class hero from Birmingham, was the perfect embodiment of the forces that rejected that conformity. He never conformed. Not to society’s expectations. Not to rock and roll’s. And not even to the vagaries of life and death as he went out on his terms, giving us one last rockfest with the gods of metal.
Ozzy is gone, but the echo of his wail, that haunted, unrepentant howl, still vibrates through every heavy riff played today. Perhaps it’s time for Lucifer to clear some room because hell is about to get a new frontman.
JENSANITY: From Denny’s Booth to Silicon Diplomat
There are different levels of smoothness. Joey Tribbiani asks, “How you doin’?” Don Draper changes the conversation. DB Cooper parachutes off with $200,000 and a bourbon. But right now, the crown might belong to Jensen Huang- the leather-jacketed CEO of Nvidia who, with a casual grin and a drink in hand, can move markets and geopolitical fault lines.
Huang’s rise reads like a cinematic montage spliced with moments of sheer grit. Born in Taiwan, he was sent to the US at nine, living with his uncle in Tacoma, Washington. His uncle mistakenly enrolled him at Oneida, a religious reform school masquerading as an elite academy. There, a 17-year-old roommate taught him push-ups while he taught the older boy to read. Insults like “chink” at the local public school didn’t deter him; Huang excelled, graduating at 16 and earning a place at Oregon State University, where he charmed his future wife, Lori Mills, not with smooth talk but relentless homework sessions.
Huang’s first job wasn’t in tech- it was washing dishes at a Denny’s, a stint that taught him to stay calm during chaos. Fittingly, Nvidia was conceived at a Denny’s booth in 1993, co-founded with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company pivoted from failed Sega console chips to breakthrough GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that revolutionised gaming and, later, artificial intelligence. The CUDA architecture and Nvidia’s GeForce series made Huang a cult figure among developers long before Wall Street realised his worth.
Fast forward to 2025: Nvidia is worth over $4 trillion and sits at the heart of the AI arms race. But Huang’s influence extends beyond Silicon Valley’s glowing servers, he is now a de facto diplomat bridging the world’s two superpowers. Just days after shaking hands with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Huang was in Beijing, addressing a crowd in fluent Mandarin, having secured a stunning reversal of a US ban on Nvidia’s H20 AI chip sales to China.
This “chip détente” safeguarded billions in revenue and maintained China’s reliance on American technology — a strategy openly endorsed by the Trump administration. Huang’s argument was simple yet strategic: blocking Nvidia would only gift the market to Huawei, undermining US tech leadership. His mix of engineering authority and political neutrality turned him into a trusted intermediary — a role once held by Apple’s Tim Cook, but with far higher stakes in the era of AI.
Nvidia’s GPUs are the beating heart of generative AI systems worldwide, making Huang’s decisions critical to both economic and national security agendas. “Technology leadership requires big markets,” Huang told reporters in Beijing, pointing out that China alone has “half the world’s AI researchers.” His ability to speak the languages of MAGA and Xi Jinping Thought, while keeping Nvidia independent of Chinese supply chains, has positioned him as a unique power broker in an increasingly fractured tech world.
From a kid who mastered homework to the man who can sway the global AI race, Jensen Huang has gone from building chips to shaping the future. And like all true smooth operators, he does it without breaking a sweat.
What is Extrapolation Bias?
We’re all amateur prophets now. One headline drops, and suddenly we’re predicting the end of civilisation. A single scandal, and we declare an entire industry rotten. One awkward video of someone stealing a chocolate bar, and suddenly we’re diagnosing the death of morality. We don’t just see events- we turn them into omens.
This is the brain’s favourite trick: to grab one thread and pretend it’s the whole tapestry. A company fires one CEO, and we call it proof that “all tech is corrupt.” One AI hiccup, and we’re convinced the robots are plotting our funerals. One influencer fakes a vacation, and Instagram becomes the Matrix.
We mistake dots for patterns, stories for evidence. Because why wrestle with complexity when you can binge-watch your own paranoia? It’s easier to declare a world-ending conspiracy than to admit life is just a mess of unrelated events.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this week’s Random Musing is about exactly this — our obsession with turning every ant hill into a mountain range. Read more.
Post-Script: Fix You, or Fix Your LinkedIn Bio?
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who go to Coldplay concerts, and those who wake up the next morning wishing they hadn’t. [I belong to a near-extinct tribe that doesn’t do concerts, doesn’t do mosh pits — I do playlists, at home, with tea or any other beverage and full WiFi.
July 16, Levi’s Stadium, California. The kind of night where 65,000 people hum Fix You in unison, and one CEO fixes himself firmly in the annals of HR history.
The scene: the Kiss Cam. The players: Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, married, father, boardroom evangelist. Kristin Cabot, Chief People Officer, architect of “award-winning cultures,” LinkedIn priestess of psychological safety. They don’t kiss. But they don’t not kiss either. They squirm, huddle, recoil, and try not to look like what they clearly are. Read more.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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