A

She/her
21

[A @A53669350]

Five mins into Barbie and my mom tells me she’s bored. Last scene i look over at her and she’s wiping her tears off

[A @A53669350]

Please look into this.

[A @A53669350]

Order ID - S011260705022351023003

[Unnati Bagga @Unnati_Bagga55]

Gen Z's purchase criteria is not "does this work." It is "does this look good on my story."

Packaging used to be what protected the product, and now it is the product. Dayly Body puts body wash in a whipped cream bottle. Crepdog Crew's socks come in ice lolly boxes, colour matched to the flavour on the front. Hibiscus Monkey's skincare arrives in a shipping box that turns into a Ludo board.

This is honestly the best organic marketing strategy that has been cracked by upcoming indie brands. They've figured out that Gen Z doesn't buy what they can't post.

Quirky packaging is the new social currency.

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

If I had $100,000 to invest in my health, I'd buy these:

- Sauna
- Hot tub
- Home gym
- Air purifier
- Meal prep
- Cold plunge
- Health coach
- Water flosser
- Standing desk
- Under desk treadmill
- Functional blood work
- Red light therapy lamp
- Incandescent light bulbs
- Reverse osmosis water filter
- Great mattress and bedding
- Membership at the best gym in the area

What about you?

[Janhavi Jain | Building SKIPD @janwhyy]

The Delhi High Court just ruled against Google in a trademark case that every Indian founder needs to know about!!

Hindware sued because searches for "Hindware" returned competitor ads - Cera, Grohe, above their own listing. Customers looking specifically for Hindware were being intercepted at the moment of highest intent.

The court ruled it trademark infringement. Competitor keyword bidding on your brand name is now legally actionable in India.

Search your brand name on Google right now.

If a competitor's ad appears before yours, you have a case, and your competitor has a problem.

This reshapes performance marketing in India. Keyword bidding on competitor names is standard practice across every category - beauty, fintech, edtech, D2C.

The brands doing it most aggressively are also the ones most exposed to this ruling. Let's see how this pans out.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[A @A53669350]

@BharaviYadav You started pilates???

[A @A53669350]

Great quality too 👌 👏

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

Late post but Happy Holi 🌸 🫟

Low-key impressed by how @instamart has built Noice: premium + craft + small batch positioning. Add to that the truck-art inspired packaging that stands out instantly!

Great example of design + distribution working together in GTM.

[Nduko™ @nduko__]

If you are into remote jobs, make use of this tools:

1. https://t.co/W4pk7QuBEu – solves anything
2. https://t.co/y2FZ1ORxKn – create and publish videos
3. https://t.co/YbEyO0veR6 – creates art better than humans
4. https://t.co/ojq6RxRkgV – rank website higher in AI chats

[Hassan. @Heyitshassan]

I apply for a job and immediately start fantasizing about it. Where I’ll live, how I’ll commute to work, and how I’ll spend the salary

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

Cherry blossom season in HYD! 🌸🌸

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

Tried the valentine special menu at @PolarBearSundae at their Madhapur outlet! As much as the place smelled exotic, the icecream range needs improvement. The strawberry cookie was a bit underwhelming! 6/10 overall. 🍓🍪

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

Haleem is back! Ramzan Mubaarak ft. Hyderabadi Haleem at Cafe Bahar and other delicacies! 🌙

[A @A53669350]

@BharaviYadav Best galentines😚😚😚

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

How I spent my Galentine’s! @A53669350

[Bhairavi Yadav @BharaviYadav]

This is me not chasing anything!

[Kritika kumari @kritikatwtss]

Someone just said it

[Oshaz @ThisisOshaz_]

What doesn’t kill you gives you cortisol spike, weight gain and hair loss.

[s @shivululu]

best relationship idea: leave this country, do our masters in the UK, never come back by default, get married in the countryside, call our parents for a small wedding, overcast sky, no society