Dinesh Mahapatra

PhD Student Development Studies. Spent some time @IndianExpress | Interest: Indian & World Politics | Economics | #Codex #Claude #Obsidian #Skills #Agents

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

In the past month, I didn't see much protest from Odias or the Odia student community demanding the resignation of their own Dharmendra Pradhan. Once again, they have proven themselves to be behind others in terms of political activism.

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

This is happening in Odisha. Godimedia of Odisha is wishing Dharmendra Pradhan a bright future.

[OTV @otvnews]

#Bhubaneswar | As Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan led transformative reforms, tweets CM Mohan Majhi.

#DharmendraPradhan #DharmendraPradhanResigns

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

@PChidambaram_IN 97, reminds everyone of the dream, the dream budget 😉

[Chirag @chirag]

India's 24 Parliamentary Standing Committees write thousands of reports a year. Almost no one reads them.

SansadLocal puts them in your browser, with on-device AI summaries. No key, no server.

Built on @pranaykotas's ParliamentWatch.

https://t.co/KfEcWWyYJY

[Scholarship for PhD @ScholarshipfPhd]

PhD Student Vs Supervisor

[Kristoffer @indiohistorian]

What an insult to the workers in the original photograph.

[peeleraja @peeleraja]

The Indigo crisis is nothing compared to a large scale crisis we will see in about 5 years thanks to students and educators willingly gutting education using generative AI

[Buggy Human @SridharanAnand]

Who's the genius who named surveillance app such that acronym is SS?

[Aiden Bai @aidenybai]

just so we're clear:

Antigravity is a Windsurf wrapper

Windsurf is a VSCode wrapper

VSCode is an Electron wrapper

Electron is a Chromium wrapper

Chromium is a C++ wrapper

C++ is a C wrapper

C is an Assembly wrapper

Assembly is a Machine Code wrapper

Machine Code is a Binary wrapper

Binary is a Physics wrapper

Physics is a Math wrapper

Math is a Logic wrapper

Logic is a Philosophy wrapper

Philosophy is a Humans wrapper

Humans are a Carbon wrapper

Carbon is a Star-forged-matter wrapper

Stars are a Gravity wrapper

Gravity is… definitely not an Antigravity wrapper

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

Between two people, a dog always barks at the person who is less confident and poorly dressed, much like the preference of humans. Dogs are a perfect reflection of people who raise them. The dog problem is actually a human problem. Both bad dogs and bad men are a menace.

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

@sidhutripathy @HaramiParindey Dekhne ke baad humhe bhi bolna, if it's good.

[Santiago @svpino]

Not every problem needs AI.

In fact, most problems don’t need AI.

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

Why he is in uniform, Joker!

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Ahmedabad Plane Crash | Former Union Minister for Civil Aviation, Rajiv Pratap Rudy says, "...This is very sad and unfortunate. But I am not an expert. It will be very difficult to say what the cause of the accident was. It can be clear only after an investigation. This was a 787 Dreamliner aircraft which is considered a very efficient aircraft. It can easily fly for 12-14 hours after taking off. The flight was going from Ahmedabad to London. So, the plane must have 80-90 tons of fuel...I can't comment on the cause of the accident, but only after an investigation can it be clear. This is very sad and unusual..."

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Since the End of History, history seems to have gone nuts.

[Dinesh Mahapatra @DineshM90]

Given Boeing's history, its top leadership should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. #planecrash

[Indian Tech & Infra @IndianTechGuide]

🚨 A staggering 29,970 people lost their lives on Mumbai’s suburban train network in the last 11 years.

7 per day 🙏

[Knowledge North @KnowledgeNorth]

SAVAGE 🇨🇳 CHINESE RESPONSE TO THE 🇺🇸 USA 🔥

[Niranjan Rajadhyaksha @CafeEconomics]

Want some respite from the mayhem? Here is a series of essays on 29 distinguished Indian economists from the past, whose work still informs our present. More entries will be added in the coming months. What follows is a thread on the individual entries.

https://t.co/Xyku6F9lOl