.@nyindianff 2022 Awards: Best Short (Narrative) “Succulent”; Best Short (Documentary) “Kicking Balls”; Best Documentary (Feature) “Longing”; Best Child Actor(s) Reyaan Shah and Hirnaya Zinzuwadia (Gandhi & Co.) 1/2
Vast chunk of Indian elites are completely lacking any kind of compassion or empathy. Many of them even display a psychopathic tendency towards deriving satisfaction from the misfortune of random strangers. Quite disturbing.
@TheSincereDude Shift to text messages. Beat them at their game. Revert to emails. Revert to bank transfers and not UPI. Pay in cash. There can be no better silent revolt. We are 500 million. They are a handful.
Video Game: Urban Indian Hell
Stage 1: Rent a house. Building collapses. You die.
Stage 2: Send your kid to coaching. Fire breaks out. They die.
Stage 3: Eat at a cafe. It catches fire. You die.
Stage 4: Drive to work. Wrong-side driver hits you. You die.
Stage 5: Get sick. Fake medicines. You die.
Stage 6: Drink water. Contaminated supply. You die.
Final Boss: Surviving things that should have been safe in the first place.
Is anyone else just as horrified as I am that the world went from having meaningful discourse about climate change to rapidly building environmentally destructive data centers because, shiny new toy? They're gonna be the end of us all.
Everyone's consistently getting mad that this is happening, but it's only because the world has gotten immensely richer. And too many of these travel-obsessed types are middle-class ppl cosplaying as wealthy bc they can "travel the world" now.
You are just not rich enough to /actually/ escape the crowds anymore - that's why you're upset. You've been clocked as middle class, you are getting a middle class experience, and surprise, you don't like it.
Living in 100% Amrit Kaal,
driving 80% ethanol cars,
breathing 60% polluted air,
drinking 40% adulterated milk,
in an education system with 20% credibility,
to get killed with 0% dignity, by USA missiles, by mob lynchings, by a badly made bridge or a pothole, or just a stampede.
Discussing the Congress's electoral decline without discussing electoral bonds, the SIR, and the abuse of EC, ED and CBI, and breaking of electoral mandates and political parties alike, is like analysing a cricket match while refusing to acknowledge that one team got to appoint the umpire. It isn't objective, it's selectively incomplete.
Rahul Gandhi and the Congress can certainly be questioned and held accountable. But accountability that is demanded only of the opposition, while treating the institutional playing field as neutral and uncontested, is not just tone-deaf or unserious. It is manipulative. What is omitted from the analysis is doing as much work as what is included.
I don’t know what’s going to unfold in Delhi today but am going to go check it out. There’s a group of young people trying to raise their voices about something atrocious the young have been subjected to. And it’s so tiring to hear the complicated conspiracy theories . That this is actually X pretending to be Y and it’s wolf in sheep clothing and etc etc etc.
India wants to become a $10 trillion economy.
But CBSE could not protect a password.
And no.
This is not a joke.
18.5 lakh Class 12 students appeared for CBSE Board Exams in 2026.
Their answer sheets were handed to a company with 51 employees.
A teenager reportedly broke into the system within minutes.
This was not innovation.
It was institutional comedy.
CBSE launched On-Screen Marking.
OSM.
The promise?
Transparency.
Accuracy.
Speed.
The result?
Swapped answer sheets.
Blurred scans.
Missing pages.
Portal crashes.
Embarrassment.
Some students opened photocopies of their answer books.
They found someone else's handwriting under their roll number.
Now look at the scale.
18.5 lakh students.
26 countries.
7,574 exam centres.
120 subjects.
98 lakh answer booklets.
40 crore pages.
77,000 teachers logging in.
All processed in 10 days.
And managed by a company smaller than many CBSE schools.
Then came the tender.
Two companies qualified.
TCS.
600,000 employees.
57 years of credibility.
$29 billion revenue.
And Coempt Edu Teck.
51 employees.
Guess who won.
Not the company trusted by banks.
Airlines.
Governments.
Stock exchanges.
The other one.
But there is a twist.
Coempt was once called Globarena Technologies.
The same company linked to Telangana's 2019 Intermediate Exam fiasco.
3.8 lakh students received wrong marks.
Toppers became failures.
3 lakh sought reverification.
20 students died by suicide in eight days.
Months later.
Globarena changed its name.
The memories remained.
Then came the cybersecurity masterpiece.
OTP verification on the browser.
Not the server.
Password resets without old passwords.
Examiner IDs editable from browser storage.
And a master password sitting inside public source code.
No encryption.
No hashing.
Just there.
A School project is much secured and Scalable than this.
Like keeping jewellery outside a jewellery shop with a sign saying:
"Please don't touch."
CERT-In was reportedly informed in February 2026.
The platform went live anyway.
77,000 teacher logins.
40 crore pages.
No fix.
70,000 answer books required rescanning.
15,000 shifted back to physical evaluation.
The digital revolution quietly asked for revaluation.
Then officials defended the system.
And later called IITs to help fix it.
Which is a bit like crashing a bus and then inviting ISRO to explain gravity.
Now comes the uncomfortable question.
TCS was on the shortlist.
TCS lost.
A company carrying the baggage of a past exam controversy won.
How?
Who approved it?
Who reviewed the risks?
Who signed the file?
Nobody seems eager to answer.
NEET chaos.
Now CBSE chaos.
Every year we hear the same slogans.
Student-centric.
Technology-driven.
Future-ready.
Wonderful words.
Terrible execution.
India does not have a shortage of talent.
India has a shortage of accountability.
Mr. Education Minister, will you answer?
How embarrassing to put out scripted videos and then hurriedly take them down. More than anything else, it reflects poorly on our educators, who should be encouraging independent thought rather than orchestrated messaging.
CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI.
The tender re-issued in August quietly removed all of it. “Scanners” became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI.
Now we know what that meant in practice. It has been exposed that COEMPT scanned the answer sheets using mobile phones.
The blurred copies, the missing pages, the unscanned books - they are not “errors.” They are the predictable outcome of a contract written to fit a vendor.
This is fraud. And every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim of it.
This morning, the Prime Minister had time to speak about mangoes. He has not had time to speak about 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned with phones.
Dharmendra Pradhan ji still sits in office.
Modi ji’s silence is no longer indifference. It is complicity.
Vedant Srivastava - 17 yrs old
Took to social media and exposed discrepancies in CBSE's OSM marking system.
Nisarga Adhikary- 19 yrs old
Hacked CBSE website and informed them (and us) that it is vulnerable and can be hacked.
Sarthak Sidhant- 17 yrs old
Exposed how CBSE bent rules to award the OSM tender to COEMPT.
These 3 kids need to be lauded. They have given us a glimmer of hope. They have shown us, not all is lost.
We still have a future to salvage.
One of the best things I've ever read: Ursula K. Le Guin on change, menopause as rebirth, and the civilizational value off elders https://t.co/F7JRCwG833
India has got a wonderful Prime Minister, caring, loving and supportive There is no one like Modi-
The heat has increased a lot, so everyone should drink plenty of water.
India’s great Prime Minister Modi held a high-level meeting yesterday. In the meeting, he called all the MPs and ministers. The entire country was expecting that, with the rising prices of petrol, diesel, and CNG, increasing inflation, and the difficult situation faced by poor people, small business owners, street vendors, and rickshaw pullers, the government would announce some relief measures or make an important decision.
But the interesting part is that Prime Minister Modi told his MPs and ministers:
“The heat has increased a lot, so all of you should drink more water.”
And then the meeting ended.
Tell me, can there be a more caring Prime Minister anywhere? In a high-level meeting, he is advising his MPs and ministers to drink plenty of water.
Now wait and watch. Today they are asking people to drink more water. India was already mixing 20% ethanol in petrol, and now the government plans to increase it to 30%. Slowly, after some time, they may even say, “Please drink less water too, we need it to produce ethanol.”
Now it is becoming clear why the great Prime Minister does not hold press conferences. He probably knows that he may not be able to answer even five serious questions.
If questions are asked about development, education, national security, healthcare, and corruption, then he himself might need to drink plenty of water.
A 19-year old broke into India's largest high school examination system of 2M+ students a year, the CBSE, and was able to view and CHANGE any students' marks.
He responsibly wrote to the team 3 months ago, and it took them 3 days to fix only one of the issues. Today, they took the entire website down.
This is a absolute embarrassment. The futures and lives of millions rests in the hands of the utterly incompetent. There is also no mass media reporting on the matter.
This topic is close to me because not only is this the education system I went through, but 12 years ago and silently for 5yrs since, I'd written about and reported a much less severe vulnerability allowing me to scrape these results too. More than a decade later, not much has changed.
This 19yo, Nisarga Adhikary, wrote a great piece outlining each vulnerability he reverse engineered:
- the master password leak
- the client-side 2fac / OTP validation workaround
- tokenless access to the entire internal app (dashboard, evaluator details, etc) setting dummy browser values
- changing any password without knowing the old one
- an IDOR vuln allowing you to act as any user and edit exam marks
For those interested in a beautiful study in security breaches, this is a must read (link below).
If there's any light at the end of the tunnel, it's that a 19yo who never went to college can do things 99% of top engineers couldn't figure out.
I came across a theory that AI is starting to make more mistakes because the internet is increasingly polluted with AI slop. The idea of AI cannibalising itself into obscurity is one of my favourite things ever. I hope it is true and I hope it becomes impossible to fix.