Berty Thomas

Hobbyist programmer. TEDx speaker. Techie interested in Law. Studying Cyber Law (NLSIU). Notable work: Under45 Vaccination alerts (acquired by @healthifyme)

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@CitizenKamran Yeah bro, there is a pattern with you.

Check this tweet. And you copied this 3hrs later! 🫣

[Sann @san_x_m]

Her name was Jolly.

Her full name was Jollyamma Joseph. She lived in Koodathayi village in Kozhikode district, Kerala.

She was known in the neighbourhood as a warm and devout woman. She attended church regularly. She helped neighbours. She was the kind of person people trusted completely.

She also told everyone she was a commerce lecturer at NIT Calicut. She left home every morning with a bag and returned every evening.

For years her family believed her. She had forged her credentials and her identity card. She had no job. She sustained the lie for years.

Between 2002 and 2016 she poisoned six members of her own family with cyanide.

Her first victim in 2002 was Annamma Thomas, her mother-in-law, who had been pressing her to find a job. Annamma died after drinking mutton soup. No autopsy. Heart attack.

Her husband Roy Thomas died in 2011 after eating dinner she had prepared. No autopsy. Heart attack.

When Roy's uncle Mathew Manchadiyil began insisting that Roy's death needed investigation, she poisoned his drink in 2014. He died. No autopsy.

She had fallen in love with her cousin Shaju Sakhariyas. His wife Sili stood in the way. Jolly poisoned Sili's food in 2014. Sili died.

Then she gave cyanide on a piece of bread to Sili's two-year-old daughter Alphine. Alphine died in hospital two days later.

In 2016 she poisoned the medication of Tom Thomas, her father-in-law. He died.

She then married Shaju.

The case unravelled in 2019 when Roy's brother Rojo filed a police complaint. Investigators exhumed all six bodies. Forensic tests confirmed cyanide in two of them.

A close friend told the court in 2023 that she had confessed all six murders to him personally.

Jolly Joseph was arrested in October 2019. The trial is ongoing at the Kozhikode Additional Sessions Court. Netflix made a documentary about the case called Curry and Cyanide.

Six people. Fourteen years. One family. One woman who attended church every Sunday.

Repost this. Some stories must not be allowed to disappear.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@Lolita_TNIE @IRCTCofficial He will start booking all of those tickets. Probably in 5-10min, he would have booked for everyone in the queue.
Then he calls everyone to pay for the tickets. And everyone pays the exact fare.
Point is, rest of the country is competing against that guy :)

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@Lolita_TNIE @IRCTCofficial There used to be a ticket staff at a rural railway station in Kerala who used to do something super useful for people.
He will take the reservation forms from everyone 15min before Tatkal start (in the same order they stood in queue).
Then as soon as the booking starts, /n

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@ankithalder @volklub No. It's E10. There will be a sticker at the back of the fuel cap.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@bhash I came to read the service complaints in the comments 🫣

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@barandbench @RitwikinCourt After 16yrs 🙄

[Felix Josemon @Felix_Josemon]

Kerala has some of the most educated people yet it has some of the most ignored roads too.

Every year, accidents happen that didn't have to. Commuters, school children, and two-wheeler riders find themselves navigating the same craters they navigated last monsoon and the one before that.

We report, make videos, and the system responds with a patch that arrives months later, sometimes a year later, just enough to quiet the anger but never enough to address the problem underneath it.

Then the monsoon arrives, fills every crater with water, and nobody knows how deep it is until someone finds out the hard way.

Sajith Lal M K, a Flutter developer, got tired of watching this never-ending cycle and decided to do something about it.

He built https://t.co/2MDQA0QIOG , an open-source community pothole map built specifically for Kerala. The name says it all, and so does the problem he is trying to solve.

→ An interactive dark map that shows every reported pothole near you, updated in real time.

→ Route marking so you can trace the exact bad stretch.

→ Severity levels across Low, Medium, and High, colour coded so the scale of the problem speaks for itself.

→ Community voting that keeps the data honest, real reports stay and false ones get filtered out.

→ Photo evidence attached to every submission, because proof matters.

→ Live updates that put every new report on the map the moment it comes in.

→No app to download. No signup needed to view. Completely free.

What's interesting is that he drew inspiration from Alkesh Das who built https://t.co/gM6Zh76sDD and the team behind https://t.co/ywxS3et76h, builders who are quietly trying to ease public life and put people in control of things they were never had a say in.

At Kerala Product Hunt (KPH), this is exactly who we exist to find and amplify, builders who see a real problem and ship a real solution.

Check it out at https://t.co/2MDQA0QIOG and report the potholes in your area.

Noise fades. Data doesn't. Accountability matters.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@jasveer10 I am happy for the both of them. Both of them are right. They are just wrong for eachother.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@AmaluAcid_ How is this a downfall for the state? It is the state which has spoken.
Seriously, we need to start respecting people who voted differently from what we have.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@naziafarheen15 The reason for the liberals losing ground around the world is their disdain for public opinion if it doesn't go their way.
It is always someone else's fault and never look inward 🙄

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@hyderabaddoctor She had said that she drank water from the stream.

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@amshilparaghu One thing I have always noticed in Bangalore, coming from Kerala, the BMTC folks are always looking to get passengers on board.
This used to be a pleasant surprise because back then, Kerala KSRTC folks would never stop for passengers.
Kudos to Karnataka RTC! 👏

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@thetatvaindia I was for a moment like, oh no, putting out a lithium fire using water. And then it stopped the fire!

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@nikhilnarayanan @bruiseinvain @Doodle_muni Damn! I too have one!! 😬

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@BalMeghna Can you share the questionnaire please?
1000 sample is fine, as long as the sampling is done properly.

I am reminded of the old demonetisation survey which was done on the "Namo" app (Question was, do you support the government action against Black Money) 😬

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@ShekharGupta @SagrikaKissu Ah, the "journalism" standards these days... 🙄

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@sahajtloi Beautifully explained! 🙌🏼

[Berty Thomas @BertyThomas]

@evilnitin @sone_do_mujhe I meant no state sales tax.
New Hampshire or Delaware

[MOHINI WEALTH (NRI) @MohiniWealth]

On the night of May 20, 2025, a little girl in a faded pink frock fell asleep on her mother’s lap at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. Her parents, simple people from Solapur, had come to Mumbai for her father’s treatment. They were exhausted. Just for a moment, the mother closed her eyes.

When she opened them, her daughter was gone.

Six months.
Six months of walking from police station to police station.
Six months of showing the same crumpled photograph to strangers on trains, in slums, in orphanages.
Six months of the father not sleeping, the mother not eating, both of them growing hollow-eyed, whispering the same name into the dark: “Aarohi… Aarohi…”

In Varanasi, a thousand kilometres away, a tiny girl with no memory of her real name was learning to call herself “Kashi.” She had been found crying near the railway tracks in June, barefoot and terrified. The orphanage gave her food, a bed, and a new name. She smiled easily, because children always do, but sometimes at night she clutched the edge of her blanket and asked for “Aai” — Marathi for mother — and no one understood.

Back in Mumbai, the police refused to close the file. They printed posters with Aarohi’s face, stuck them on every platform from Lokmanya Tilak Terminus to Bhusawal to Varanasi Cantt. They ran newspaper ads, knocked on doors, begged journalists for help. Six months is a long time for hope to stay alive, but some officers carried her photograph in their shirt pockets like it was their own child.

Then, on November 13, a local reporter in Varanasi saw the poster. Something clicked. He had seen a girl who spoke Marathi words in her sleep. He made a phone call.

The next morning, a Mumbai Police inspector sat in front of a laptop in Varanasi and opened a video call. On the screen appeared a little girl in a pink frock — the same colour she was wearing the day she vanished. The mother, standing behind the officer in Mumbai, saw her daughter and collapsed without a sound. The father just kept repeating, “That’s my Aarohi… that’s my baby…”

They flew her back on Children’s Day — November 14.

When the plane landed, the entire Mumbai Crime Branch was waiting. They had bought her balloons and a new frock, sky blue this time. But the moment the little girl stepped out and saw the sea of khaki uniforms, she did something no one expected.

She ran.

Not away — toward them.

Tiny legs pumping, arms outstretched, she threw herself at the nearest officer and laughed — the purest, clearest laugh that had been missing from the world for half a year. The officer, a tough man who had seen everything, felt his eyes burn. He lifted her high, and she wrapped her arms around his neck like he was family.

Her parents were crying too hard to walk. So the policemen carried their daughter to them.

The mother touched her face again and again, as if checking she was real. The father fell to his knees and pressed his forehead to his child’s tiny feet, sobbing words no one could understand except God.

And the little girl? She just kept smiling, looking from her parents to the officers and back again, completely unaware that she had turned an entire police station into a sobbing, laughing, praying family.

Six months of darkness ended in one hug.

Aarohi is home now.
The kidnapper is still out there, but that is tomorrow’s fight.

Today, a mother is singing lullabies again.
Today, a father is smiling in his sleep.
And somewhere in Mumbai, there are policemen who will never forget the weight of a four-year-old girl in their arms — the weight of an entire life returned.

Sometimes the uniform doesn’t just catch thieves.
Sometimes it carries lost children all the way back to their mothers’ hearts.