Daily Briefing: ISRO launches XpoSat, tracking where most of India’s medals come from, and more

1. A tea seller, a coffee plantation owner in Coorg, a petrol pump attendant and a petrol pump owner — what unites them? Their children went on to win medals at the Asian Games in September-October 2023. On the face of it, it’s a typical India story, written across the sprawl of geography and the hard divides of class and social circumstances. Yet, this year end, these are also 256 Happy New Year postcards, from today’s India to tomorrow’s.

Read this Express Investigation, which reveals how a sport can be a great leveller.

2. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) began the new year with the launch of its first X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XpoSat), a space-based observatory to study X-ray polarisation and its cosmic sources — celestial bodies including black holes, neutron stars and magnetars.

What all did Indian science achieve in 2023, and what’s next? Read here.

3. Two crucial choke points – the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal — threaten to disrupt over a third of global trade. Here is why we could be in for a rocky start to 2024.

4. In her Opinion piece, Aditi Narayani Paswan terms the upcoming inauguration of the Ayodhya temple as the beginning of Ram Rajya. “We usher in 2024 with the hope that poet-saint Ravidas’s Begumpura, a land without sorrow, will be reality as we enter Ram Rajya,” she writes.

5. Last year, Serbia had to change its visa rules because of the illegal migrants, including Indians, flooding it as an entry point to Europe. In our Explained section, Divya A dissects how the ‘donkey route’ works in Europe.

Before you go, check out today’s Delhi Confidential in which West Bengal leader Deepa Dasmunsi, who is the AICC in-charge in Kerala, locked horns with former state Congress chief V M Sudheeran on the party’s stance on attending the Ram Temple consecration.

Until tomorrow,

Sonal Gupta and Navmi Krishna