India Lover

I respect fair play and honesty.

[Tehseen Poonawalla Official 🇮🇳 @tehseenp]

𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 #𝐄𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐦 𝐢𝐧 𝟐 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐬. : If INDIA truly wants to cut fuel import bills by Rs 3 lakh crores, all we have to do is build decent roads, proper infrastructure & remove encroachments. But contractors pay netas their cut money & encroachers who cause traffic jams are vote banks of netas. We are told ethanol is “good for the environment” but to produce 1 litre of ethanol it takes 2500-3500 litres of water at sugar mills or above 10,000 litres per litre at rice mills! This when the country is facing water shortage. How is this good for anyone except the netas? Most ethanol distilleries are owned by netas, for example Nitin Gadkari ji’s son! And please tell me how is Gadkari ji announcing ethanol policy when he is neither the Petroleum Minister, nor Agriculture Minister, nor Industry Minister? We the people pay full price for our vehicles + road tax + insurance + tolls + GST on spares… and in return we get pathetic roads, terrible infrastructure & now forced ethanol-blended fuel that kills mileage & damages engines. Meanwhile netas with direct conflict of interest are minting crores & crores and the poor hardworking honest INDIAN suffers as most Indian vehicles aren’t even E20 compatible yet Nitin Gadkari ji is forcing these ethanol norms on us as if we are lab rats!
#EthanolScam. #EthanolScam #GadkariEthanol #MiddleClassLoot

[Anuj Gurwara @AnujGurwara]

Just thinking aloud. No claims made.

This is a Time Magazine Cover from 2011. I reposted @RahulSeeker's tweet yesterday.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this cover.

15 years ago, the world was watching two countries and genuinely could not decide which one would lead the future.

One of them does now. The other has spent the last decade and a half fighting over whose god is bigger.

I am writing this as a common citizen who grew up in this country, who continues to believe in what it is capable of, and who finds it genuinely dificult to explain the drastic economic downturn in these past years through poor governance alone.

India in 2011 was a country that had grown at consistently high rates for two decades, had a young demographic profile, and was positioned as a genuine superpower in the making.

We were leading the IT revolution at a time when the world had just figured out that technology was the new currency of power. An Indian spotted abroad was asked one common question: "Do you work in IT?"

It wasn't a stereotype so much as a signal. The world had noticed. It had clocked which direction we were moving in, and it had started to take us seriously. We weren't just a large country anymore. We were a country with momentum. And momentum, in geopolitics, is the most threatening thing of all.

And then there was the one thing that makes powerful nations genuinely nervous. India is an independent nuclear power. Not a dependent state. Not a country whose arsenal exists because someone else permitted it. Ours. On our terms. Answering to nobody.

A large, young, fast-growing, technologically ambitious, independently nuclear nation with a democratic mandate and a civilisational confidence. That is not a country you want going fully unchecked.

Putting on my tin foil hat, here is the thought I cannot entirely shake: that what has happened to India over the last many years is not simply the consequence of bad governance, corruption, or misfortune. (That of course, is a very real issue laughing in our faces every single day)

That some portion of it has been engineered, or at minimum exploited, by actors with a strategic interest in ensuring that India never becomes what it was projected to become.

There are powers that have done this before. They don't need to invade a country. They just need to find a wound in it and not let it heal - through tools of debt, dependency, tariffs, and narratives shaped by controlled media or manipulated social media algorithms. And then stay out of the way while it consumes itself.

"Just keep the wound open", as they say.

Mismanagement of a population's growth trajectory, and its basic needs which is this consistent and directional, feels almost scripted.

Let me also say - the fractures in Indian society are not new. Religious tension, caste hierarchy, linguistic division: these have existed for centuries. No government manufactured them from scratch.

A country whose population has been allowed to be preoccupied with questions of communal identity, whose minorities are economically anxious and politically marginalised, and whose civil society is increasingly reluctant to speak plainly, is a country whose productive capacity is diminished.

A nation fighting itself cannot look outward with coherence.

They couldn't tame the dragon. So they slowly fed the elephant poisoned food. Enough to keep it from breaking its own shackles. Enough for it to be grateful to be fed. The elephant didn't die. That was never the plan. A dead elephant attracts attention. It is still standing - tall above others, swaying, looking busy, occasionally making noise, hoping to get better, some day.

Someone needed only one new superpower to emerge. Not two. Someone did not want a second China.

And someone got exactly what they needed.

[ambrish gupta @ambrishgup42076]

Laughing prohibited.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@sheil96543 If supersession and stagnation are the prime reason for NFU, then no one deserves it more than the Armed Forces because they have the toughest life and the steepest pyramid of promotion. In fact it is sad to see the Armed Forces become the butt end of many flawed decisions.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@sheil96543 NFU itself is an unjustified increment given by UPA Government under bureaucratic pressure. How can same pay be given to everyone irrespective of performance? However, if given to every other category of Government service how can you deny it to the Armed Forces?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@MythbusterXX There is so much fake news on social media that it is difficult to prevent people from forwarding it out of ignorance. Not everyone knows how or what to check for. Knowing the Lt Gen very closely I am certain he could never have done anything against national interests.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@Sydusm We regret the fact that we are still a poverty stricken developing nation. How can the nation reach its true potential and stature unless we place nation and national interests above all political interests?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@tanmoyofc @Paul_Koshy @AnindyaDas1 @muralitwit @ShrutiDhore @taj_india007 @VijaySingh_law Are we about to see a ray of light at the end of a dark tunnel? Even though we are desperately waiting for that, chances are remote, at least at this point in time. Truth when submerged or buried under deceit has a way of emerging at the time of a grave crisis.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@khan_urwa44707 😂 are you kidding everyone?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@QTHESTORMM Can anyone be more depraved than that?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@spvaid And continue to pay the price to this day. Were your own brains dysfunctional?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@abhijitmajumder @NilopamS And pray how does a nation become powerful? Does it wave a magic wand? Gross National Power involves political, economic, diplomatic and military heft among a host of other things. To get there a nation has to travel a long and difficult road.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@nxt888 Well said. I am one of the very few who has travelled over all battlefields of Vietnam and I salute your courage. The stupidity they display time and again shows they have not learnt anything from all these wars. God protect the world from US stupidity and atrocities.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@Matt_Pinner Yes with all my heart and soul.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@Amelia558rs Bicycles in early fifties needed a light attached to the handle at night. This tiny thing attached to the bicycle tire was a dynamo to power that light. We needed rear mudguard reflectors too. Lovely days, riding bicycles made us healthy without polluting the environment.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@UniqloIn The irony is touching. His father died when he was a little kid. His mother slogged to give him a chance in life. He had only one shirt which he wore to school every morning and washed at night to wear again the next day. Look at where he is today. Stay blessed Bumrah.

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@RickGore10 @shanaka86 Are we suggesting that they should not have helped the drowning sailors? What we were amongst those hapless people ourselves?

[India Lover @IndiaLover16]

@GeoffreyGl70914 @shanaka86 Why don’t we speak about the US’s track record across the world with special emphasis on all the wars, interventions, regime changes, assassinations and other lofty examples set by the nation regarded as the sole super power of the world?

[Sumesh Seth @SethSumesh]

@iamviveksri #KeepDisabilityPensionTaxFree An appeal to all Indian citizens including media to stand in support of the Armed Forces Veterans raising their voice for the cause.