A girl at Rahul Gandhi's event:
"Lengthy paper is being given. 15 Lakh appear for UPSC. 1,000 people get selected.
โ What is the Govt doing for rest 14 LAKH? What is Plan-B for them?"
20L people buy LOTTERY tickets & only one wins. What's Modi doing for the rest 19,99,999?
Word of the Day: Abuse
A comic has been booked in multiple states, summoned by NCW and a man lost his job because of a crass/abusive/offensive joke.
Politicians get to be abusive without consequence?
Outrage: selective and gone too far.
THIS IS HAPPENING HERE @TRobinsonNewEra
"Holland calls them lover boys. The UK calls them grooming gangs. India calls it love jihad. We're in the United States of America; This is happening here. Do not kid yourselves"
I thought I should write something really measured and accessible explaining why this headline from @nytimes is so misleading. I wanted to do it in a way that would make sense to people who don't already see the problem. So first, I meditated. You know, to calm down.
Then I looked at the headline again and thought: WHAT THE ACTUAL REFRIGERATOR.
Okay, breathe in...and out.
To begin with, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is not a "new" hero to Indians and Hindus. That's a laughable proposition. Even I know that, and I grew up here in the United States before the internet. This is like saying George Washington is a new hero to Americans. Buildings, airports, train terminals, roads, universities, and public institutions have borne Shivaji's name for decades. Long before the current administration took office. So the question is not whether Shivaji is actually a new hero. The question is why the Times would frame him that way.
And this is where media literacy becomes useful. Notice the language. Not "new memorials have been built." Not "additional statues have been commissioned." Not even "Shivaji statues have become more common." Instead, we are told that statues of Shivaji are "rising across India." It is a fascinating choice of verb because statues do not normally "rise" in journalistic writing. Movements rise. Armies rise. Extremism rises. Threats rise. The word "rise" transforms what could have been described as commemorative acts into something vaguely threatening. The image it conjures is almost cinematic: Shivaji statues menacingly erupting from the earth across India like something out of a Marvel movie.
What makes this especially frustrating is that there are genuine debates taking place in India about history, textbooks, colonization, historical memory, and the representation of Hindu civilization. Some scholars and members of the public argue that post-Independence narratives minimized aspects of Mughal conquest, neglected Hindu resistance movements, or failed to adequately account for Hindu civilizational contributions. Others disagree. But these are real debates, and they are neither new nor confined to one political party.
In fact, Americans should find this entirely familiar. We revise textbooks all the time. We revisit historical narratives. We argue about whose stories were centered, whose stories were marginalized, and whether previous generations of historians got important things wrong. We understand that academic consensus is not infallible and that history is constantly being reexamined as new evidence emerges and new questions are asked.
Yet when these debates about Indian history are translated for Western audiences (often by Indians themselves), they often become a much simpler story: the Hindu right is resurrecting forgotten heroes for political purposes and to oppress the minorities. The problem is that Shivaji was never forgotten in the first place. The debates themselves disappear, replaced by a narrative that is far easier for Western readers to recognize and consume.
This is why bias is often less about outright falsehoods than about framing. The article does not simply describe Shivaji Maharaj. It encourages readers to understand him through a very particular lens: not as a historical figure who has occupied a central place in Indian historical memory for centuries, but as a symbol recently manufactured by "the Hindu right." Yet Shivaji was never forgotten. The framing tells us far more about how the Times wants its readers to view contemporary India and Hindus than it does about Shivaji himself.
Of course, for those of us who have been paying attention to how @nytimes covers India and Hinduism for a long time, this distorted reportage isn't out of the ordinary.
Absurd? Yes. Intellectually dishonest? Absolutely? Clearly seeking to manufacture negative public associations regarding the third-largest religion in the world? 100%
Surprising? Not even a little bit.
India is the absolute first to achieve this and every Indian should be extremely proud of how clever this is.
Let me explain what you are even looking at.
That video shows a freight train carrying shipping containers stacked two high, one box on top of another, running under live overhead electric wires.
Sounds simple. But it is not. No other country in the world has pulled this off. India is the only one.
Here is why it is so hard.
When you stack two containers on a wagon, the train becomes very tall. Around 7 metres. Normal electric train wires in India sit much lower, around 5.5 metres. So the two cannot share the same track. The train would smash straight into the wire.
That leaves you with a choice. Go electric and stack only one container. Or stack two containers and pull the train with a diesel engine.
The US, China, Canada and Australia all run double-stack trains. But they mostly do it with diesel, or on routes that were never electrified in the first place. Nobody bothered raising electric wires that high on old tracks.
India did both electric and double-stack together. That is the world first.
The reason India could do this is a decision from the early 2000s.
So, Indian Railways had a basic problem. Goods trains and passenger trains shared the same tracks. Passenger trains always get priority.
So freight trains crawled at 25 to 30 km/h. For a growing economy, moving goods that slowly is a major problem.
So we built separate tracks only for freight. No passenger trains allowed. These are the Dedicated Freight Corridors.
The government approved the project around 2006 and set up a company called DFCCIL to build two corridors.
The Western one runs from near Delhi to the port near Mumbai, around 1,500 km. The Eastern one runs from Punjab down to West Bengal, around 1,875 km.
Because they were building from zero, the engineers were not stuck with old bridges, old tunnels or old wire heights. They could decide the clearances themselves.
So they made a deliberate call to build the whole corridor tall enough for two stacked containers. And electrify it.
Then they had to solve two hard problems.
First, the wire. On a normal Indian line the wire hangs around 5.5 metres. On the freight corridor they raised it to about 7.5 metres. This is called high-rise OHE.
No railway in the world had run a regular freight wire that high before.
Second, the engine. If the wire is way up high, a normal loco cannot reach it. The arm on the roof that touches the wire, called the pantograph, would be too short.
So India needed a new locomotive. A taller reach. And enough power to drag thousands of tonnes.
This is why we built a new loco called the WAG-12.
It is a beast.
12,000 horsepower. Double the power of the old WAG-9 it replaced. It can haul trains over 6,000 tonnes, and up to 15,000 tonnes in some setups, at 100 km/h. That is roughly three times the old freight speed.
The WAG-12 has its own backstory. In November 2015, Indian Railways signed a deal worth about โน19,604 crore, around 3.4 billion dollars, with the French company Alstom.
They built a new factory in Madhepura, Bihar. Indian Railways holds 26 percent, Alstom holds 74 percent. It was the largest foreign investment ever in Indian Railways.
Over time the factory reached close to 90 percent local manufacturing. So most of each loco is now made in India.
So, the government approved an infrastructure decision in the mid 2000s, then it got built over almost two decades by DFCCIL, Indian Railways and RDSO. The locomotive came through the Alstom joint venture.
The first double-stack train ran under high-rise wires in June 2020, from Palanpur and Botad in Gujarat. The corridor sections were opened in stages after that.
And finally, why only India can do this.
Three things stack up together.
One, broad gauge.
India runs on a wider track than most of the world, 1,676 mm. A wider track gives a bigger loading box. So India can run plain flat wagons with two containers on top. Many countries need special low well-cars to manage height, and those still do not fix the wire problem.
Two, the fresh corridor.
India built new track with no height limits baked in. Old networks in Europe and the US are full of low tunnels and bridges never meant for 7 metre trains. Rebuilding all of that is close to impossible and crazy expensive.
Three, the system.
The tall wire, the high-reach pantograph and the powerful WAG-12 were all designed to work together as one package. You cannot copy just one piece. You need the whole thing.
Put those three together and other railways simply cannot recreate it without rebuilding from scratch.
But the part I keep thinking about is that India approved this in 2006 and ran the first train in 2020.
Fourteen years. :)
Indiaโs Islamist-left ecosystem has stripped its mask off.
A father begged for help to save his 23-year-old son.
His son is now dead and these vultures are laughing because the fatherโs views on Israel did not pass their ideological purity test.
Aditya Sharma was not Netanyahu.
He was not IDF.
He was not writing Gaza policy.
He was an Indian sailor working on a commercial vessel.
And you are mocking his death?
Stop pretending this is about humanity.
Stop pretending you are anti-war.
You are not activists.
You are political necrophiles โ people who see an Indian corpse and ask whether it can be used against Modi.
A grieving Hindu father is not your PUNCHLINE.
A DEAD INDIAN son is not your karma meme.
This is the Islamist-left ecosystem in its purest form:
Human rights for everyone โ except INDIANS they hate.
@NIA_India needs to investigate all of these terrorists who are spreading hate against Sailor Aditya Sharma
RIP Aditya Sharma , you did not deserve this.
#PeekOnGround : Peek TV spoke to one of the victim's of the NEET paper leak at the CJP Protest at Jantar Mantar. The man lost his brother allegedly due to the negligence of an unqualified medical professional. Watch this video till the end to know more #cjp#cockroachjantaparty