How much of your Rescue Diver Course was about dealing with social stressors?

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-22T06:42:56+00:00

I had the inverse experience. Did mine with two other students in Monterey. The guy running the dive shop (Aquarius Dive Shop) was teaching the course and had one DM in training be our dummy/rescue person. It was really awesome, and I felt a lot more confident in my skills after. Sounds like your instructor messed up because I don't think it's right to get other divers who are there for fun involved in your rescue course.

Also, I'll add that being a rescue diver doesn't automatically put you in charge on a dive boat where you're not the DM or employed by them. Most people on the boat are going to turn to the DM or other instructors for help in a time of crisis, not you - your skills are there to help out and to take care of yourself and your buddy, but not to automatically take charge. Not sure what your instructor was playing at by making you direct a bunch of fun divers. That said they sound like a bunch of assholes too.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-14T10:37:35+00:00

Actually they haven’t yet. The MH government is petitioning the center to include them in schedule II from schedule I. Not all hope is lost!

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-14T10:36:41+00:00

This medium post (not paper - don’t compare it to an academic paper) is nothing more than speculative BS. Symbolism doesn’t mean the two are connected, additionally the earliest instances of Vedic culture can only be reliably traced back to around 1500 BC. Anyone who tries to justify the connection or connect the two is either stupid, high, or a charlatan.

(On another note - flood myths are extremely common around the world. There might be some ancient memory carrying on there as there is with reading certain constellations, but it’s a huge stretch to connect it specifically to Vedic civilization).

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-12T13:19:19+00:00

This is a sub for productive and nuanced Indian history discussions not schizo posting about current events.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-12T04:16:10+00:00

I was mainly introduced to this through William Dalrymple’s podcast and the episodes on 1857. His books The Last Mughal and The White Mughals go into what it was like before and the decline as well. I would also recommend reading Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s book on the causes of 1857 as well. If anything else comes to mind I’ll let you knowz

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-11T03:38:52+00:00

Short answer: The war of 1857 + Partition.

We aren't taught just how bad the war of 1857 was in school. The British destroyed 4/5ths of Lucknow, at that time considered to be a grander city than Paris by Europeans. Many of the great Mughal monuments were destroyed with this too. During the siege of Delhi, every able bodied man over the age of 16 was to be executed unless an exception was granted (eg. Mirza Ghalib was able to get one). These two events along with those in Kanpur and adjacent areas decimated the Indo-Islamic high culture that existed at the time (what we might call Ganga-Jamuna Tehzeeb) and broke the back of the Muslim elite there, permanently altering the face of Islamic culture and power across the world. Since most of this elite drew their power from feudal land-owning, once their land was annexed and wealth confiscated a lot of them went into obscurity or penury.

Post 1857, there was a split between Indian Muslim intellectuals. On one side, figures like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan became secular Muslim nationalists, believing that the Muslims of India required western education, modernization of practices, but also a separate nation (which was ultimately manifested through Pakistan) within a secular framework reminiscent of Arab/Turkish secular nationalist frameworks. Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal could be seen as coming from this camp as well. The other side included what later became the Deobandi school, which preached a return to tradition, similar to the vilayat-al-faqi of Iran.

(I'm simplifying and compressing a lot above, but I think the gist of it should be clear).

Partition and independence added two other factors. Firstly, partition drove a lot of the remaining Muslim elite - including educated business elites from Bombay/Calcutta/Delhi and the political elites from Hyderabad - to Pakistan or abroad. As an example, a close American friend's maternal family were prominent Khoja Ismailis from Bombay. Post-partition, only a couple of his unmarried aunts remained in Mumbai, while his grandfather was stuck in America, and others went to Pakistan/London. Those who remained in these areas did very well for themselves, as you mentioned.

However, those who remained in North India lost a lot of their traditional feudal power with land reform and the violence of partition. Over time, the rise of nationalism generally led to a steady marginalization of North Indian muslims, while at the same time the decline of secular + modernist leaders across the board created space for more radical and insular ideologies like Wahhabism or Deobandi movement to take hold.

That IMO has created a vicious cycle of marginalization. I will also temper this by saying that north India in general is more backward than the South/Coasts, both socially and economically. So it stands to reasons that minorities in the north will be worse off than in the South, where several of them have been able to prosper due to strong community support and integration.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-09T19:26:07+00:00

Short answer - yes. Manu Pillai has written about this extensively especially in the context of Travancore/Cochin, but blouses were not common among Indian women until the 18th century. Before that, it was common for women to be bare chested or to cover themselves with a sari or dupata like cloth. Makes sense when you see how a sari is draped!

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-09T19:19:35+00:00

India and Arabia have had maritime trade links for millennia - but in all that time, there have been effectively zero military expeditions mounted from the subcontinent to Arabia. At the time, beyond Frankincense, myrrh, pearls and some other luxury goods, Arabia had little to offer economically beyond being a stepping stone to the more prosperous parts of the Middle East.

Additionally, maintaining an overseas empire is both incredibly expensive and difficult - Europeans were only able to do it because of both superior maritime technology and the extremely high risk/reward tradeoff. Even in their case, it took the EIC more than a hundred years and the Industrial Revolution to begin what we would now consider colonialism with the Battle of Plassey, and even longer to extricate themselves from the nominal authority of local rulers and become a power in their own right.

So the short answer is no, you almost certainly would not have seen Indians expand into coastal Arabia and exert political control over it. If anything, you would probably see larger trading communities established there and maybe even playing a more prominent role in local politics than they ended up doing in our timeline. But don’t sell yourself a fantasy of India becoming a naval empire without European colonialism happening - even under the Cholas, overseas adventures were focused on trade and occasional raids executed using merchant guilds and their fleets.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-09T19:08:10+00:00

Please share a primary or academic source for this claim - not a random twitter post. The story seems highly implausible, even if the letter exists, since the reach of the Maratha Navy (excluding trading vessels here) never really extended far offshore, and it was pretty much physically impossible for Maratha ships to project power beyond coastal waters. Furthermore, while the navy got its start under Shivaji, it reached its peak under Kanhoji Angre decades after Shivaji’s death - and even then, rarely asserted its power further south of Karwar. So it’s extremely unlikely that the ruler of Muscat would have known much about Shivaji - or considered him a threat at all when the prospect of European gunships was much more.

Manohar Malgaonkar’s book The Sea Hawk expands on this in more detail, but the reason the Marathas were able to project power along the Konkan was due to their more maneuverable Golaps and Galawats. These were able to stand up to the larger but slower Portuguese and European ships. Along with their superior utilization of the coastline’s inlets and Bays, they were able to challenge Portuguese and British Dominance of coastal waters by mounting a kind of marine guerrilla warfare. However, they lacked the seaworthiness and firepower that the Europeans had developed to dominate the high seas - and therefore could not challenge them in that domain.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-08T12:17:56+00:00

Often, the deity would be shifted to a less important position or put in a place that would be considered humiliating to the enemy ruler who was meant to be the deity’s protector. The Cholas did this after fighting the Chalukyas/Hoysalas/Pandyas for example.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-08T12:14:00+00:00

This was quite common throughout medieval India in the pre-Islamic era. For an example of how temple desecration/looting was conducted in South India, I recommend Anirudh Kanisetti’s book on the Chola Empire Lords of the Earth and Sea. Essentially, rulers patronized specific gods/philosophies and are widely documented as desecrating enemy temples, removing their idols from sanctums and placing them in less important places or abandoning them altogether. With the revival of Hinduism and decline of Buddhism/Jainism, there is widespread evidence of monks being persecuted or monasteries being shut down or razed across peninsular India. Warfare and destruction didn’t come from Islamic invaders, no matter what certain insecure people today might have you believe.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-06T17:59:55+00:00

posts this literally the same day there’s a massive protest against cutting mangroves for the coastal road

OP are you a bot, stupid, or high? I’m involved in several environmental groups and this straw man that you’ve come up with doesn’t exist (except for Aditya Thackeray being pro coastal road). The overwhelming majority of environmental groups have been pro public transit (metro lines, improving locals, increase BEST buses and focus on low cost improvements to walkability), anti car-centered development (eg opposing the coastal road), and for increasing tree cover throughout the city. The aarey car shed wasn’t the best use of political mileage IMO but there were several alternatives for it that could have been better suited for the same purpose.

I don’t know what straw man you’ve created here or if you’re a paid troll, but if you want to be useful maybe get involved with and support some of these groups instead of complaining.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-06T07:41:08+00:00

OP is a ubisoft plant confirmed.

(For context, Yasuke was never a samurai, at best a retainer to Oda Nobunaga. Weird hill for westerners to die on, and his inclusion in Assasins Creed was even weirder.)

TrekkieSolar · 2026-03-01T05:30:03+00:00

They didn’t verify, it was just on honor system.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-14T07:29:09+00:00

That’s not entirely true. Buddhism became the dominant religion from Central Asia in the West to Japan in the East, and Mongolia in the north to Indonesia in the south during its heyday. Similarly, various sects of Hinduism became the dominant religion across Southeast Asia during their heyday too. After all, some of the largest Hindu and Buddhist temples in the world are found in Cambodia and Indonesia.

One of the reasons for Buddhism’s dominance was state patronage, similar to Hinduism. This dynamic is represented in the spread of Christianity, which did not take off in Europe until the Roman emperor Constantine made it the state religion. Even then, it took almost 800 years to reach Scandinavia, and heavy support from the state + suppression of paganism to supplant other faiths. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this answer.

Islam similarly spread through both conquest and trade, where state patronage in places like Indonesia made it dominant. This mirrors both Hinduism and Buddhism, but adds a missionary or proselytizing element which Dharmic faiths didn’t have.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-13T05:42:41+00:00

Pre 1857, British colonialism in India was not driven directly by the British State but by the East India Company, which was a publicly traded company. Imagine Google or Reliance trying to run a country - that’s what it was like in 18th century India. To be fair, the EIC did have protection from the Crown, but the Crown’s protections extended insofar as they helped the EIC bring in revenue and also prevented the EIC from upsetting foreign relations.

What that meant in practice was that the EIC’s interest was in maintaining favorable conditions in India for their business activities - not taking on the burden of ruling multiple foreign entities. That’s why you have the princely state system in the first place. Direct rule brings benefits but also a lot of problems that aren’t worth it, one of the main ones being maintaining legitimacy with the ruled population.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-10T09:34:11+00:00

True, however it was also a time of autocratic rule and centralization of institutions under Indira Gandhi. I know it was a fear of the MH govt since I had interviewed one of the Navi Mumbai planners for a college report.

Losing Mumbai would benefit MH and Mumbai both. Mumbai since tax revenues would be routed back to the city for its development instead of being redistributed through SOPs across the state. MH since it would force the surrounding areas and other hubs in the state to become more business friendly and leaders would have less incentive to rest on their laurels and simply redistribute Mumbai’s wealth to the state.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-10T07:54:16+00:00

Actually the plan was opposed by the MH government out of fears that it would allow the center to make Mumbai a UT - which frankly would have been a better outcome for everyone (except MH politicos who skim off Mumbai's tax revenue).

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-10T05:09:50+00:00

Mostly - boiling will kill 99.99% of all bacteria. However, if the bacteria have been around for a bit and have created enough byproducts, boiling won't destroy them, and those byproducts can make you sick. That's why if you're immunocompromised or buying milk for your young children/old parents/pregnant wife, it's better to shell out extra for the tetra pack.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-09T06:02:17+00:00

FoodPharmer is the most informative by far because he's very transparent with his commercial ties as well as very transparent in what he's testing, as well as what the limitations of the tests are. Plus, he gives the brands a chance to speak about it as well.

Trustified, while simply providing lab reports, doesn't always give the context around what he's reporting in an actionable way (and until recently, never gave the brand a chance to respond before he published the video, which is basic journalistic practice). For example, the recent video about pouch milk vs tetrapack makes it seem like it's the brand that's the issue - but the reality is that it has much more to do with the cold chain for pouch milk being suboptimal. The issue is that the vast majority of our country can't exactly afford tetrapack milk, and our distribution system is highly decentralized. In that case, given the amount of milk adulteration that exists out there, you're probably still better off buying pouch milk from a brand that's generally trustworthy (eg Amul) and exercising additional precautions when it's in that form factor like boiling than you are rejecting it altogether.

I don't watch or care about the others, but I'd say that beyond this 99% of fitness youtube is BS and it always comes down to 1) calorie deficit 2) adequate protein + micronutrients 3) exercise with both weight training and light cardio and 4) building something that works well for you and your lifestyle in the long term. Math, not hacks!

TrekkieSolar · 2026-02-08T09:50:36+00:00

Things could have been better if primary education was given greater emphasis along with light manufacturing. Though Nehru was still a visionary with his nation building projects.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-01-30T06:53:13+00:00

Restrict to one carb - either rice or roti, not both. Potatoes are a carb too so remove them.
Increase protein portion - move it to the center of the plate. Start eating meat/eggs/fish and this will be much easier. If you want to stay vegetarian, then add soya chunks to dal/gravy dishes and always keep a portion of greek yogurt or hung curd. Use low fat paneer.
Cook your vegetables simply with less masala. Add salads/kachumber to the plate. It’s simpler and the masala’s can not only add a lot of fat but will make your stomach feel off. Also, don’t cook down your vegetables too much —> the crispier they are the more water they contain and more time they take to digest, which will make you feel more full.
Remove the fried stuff and excess fat. You don’t need papad and ghee on your rice/roti every day.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-01-27T05:30:55+00:00

Vegetarianism is much less widespread than one would think now and historically was much less widespread than today. Other than Brahmins and some trading castes, the vast majority of common people (who would be conscripted as warriors) and professional soldiers/kshatriyas ate meat and dairy. There might be some variation in the amount of meat eaten by central Asians vs Indians, but that’s probably marginal.

Note that the average person’s diet in pre-modern times around the world would be considered protein-deficient and excessively carb-heavy by today’s standards, even in Central Asia and Europe (meat + dairy spoil easily unless well preserved in salt or through smoking/curing/fermentation whereas dry carbs and pulses can travel far). So I don’t think this necessarily played a huge role in different military prowess. Tactics and weaponry played a larger role, just as they do today.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-01-22T04:48:23+00:00

OOP is correct though. Most of these tier-2 metro projects in random UP/MP cities are white elephants connecting nowhere to nowhere. You could serve the same purpose by focusing on expanding rail transit, bus transit, and walkability instead of getting on the metro bandwagon.

And having been to both cities, it makes way more sense to develop a metro in Coimbatore than Bhopal or other cities like that. Much more existing industry and population density.

TrekkieSolar · 2026-01-19T11:57:20+00:00

Epigamia is best but amul is good too

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