Ashwin Kumar

Migration Researcher. Itinerant. PhD, @cornellilr | Research Fellow, @iimad_in | Previously, @GC_Migration; Adjunct @CunySLU, @citytechcuny. Views are my own.

[Ashwin Kumar @akumar_1289]

Bit late to this but this edition, edited by @rajancds and which I had the pleasure of working on, is an excellent resource for anyone interested in refugee issues (past and present) related to India. Please do give it a read.
https://t.co/ZVwiCXCwE5

[naresh fernandes @tajmahalfoxtrot]

Excellent. Now waiting for their piece about Indians trying to get Schengen visas.

[Michael Elgort @just_whatever]

This person in the video has built a regression model on Lionel Messi’s (@TeamMessi) longevity and scoring ability and according to it Messi is about 8 standard deviations away from the curve (8 sigma). It is so rare in one tailed probability that the chance for someone like Messi to appear in this world is 1 in 1.61 quadrillion meaning Messi is virtually impossible and mathematically infinitesimally rare

To understand how small a 1 in 1.61 quadrillion chance is, compare it to this: Powerball Jackpot gives you a chance of winning the lottery with roughly 1 in 292 million chance. You are about 5.5 million times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot on a single ticket than to see an 8-sigma event

For comparison you can see image with @Cristiano Ronaldo in the next post, who is also an outlier, but the chance of seeing someone like him is way more likely

[Cihan Tugal @CihanTugal]

Very important, well-written, and timely set of essays on far-right instrumentalization of post-colonial discourses.
Much better than most previous liberal and Marxist rants against post-colonial scholarship. Reasoned, modest, but still thorough and unforgiving.
1/6

[রিয়া | Riya @riyacusk]

Dipali Das became a citizen through CAA almost two months back after she was declared illegal immigrant, spent two years in the detention camp of Silchar Central Jail.
https://t.co/hg5OSCotdB

[Vjekoslav Krajačić @vkrajacic]

So prompt engineers learned English is imprecise for coding and started using stricter syntax. I wonder how long it will take before they come full circle and land back at programming languages again.

[Surbhi Kesar @SurbhiKesar]

So much chatter about Claude’s lit review skills. Are students not taught the purpose of lit review?
Existing literature is part of the puzzle of your research that’s resolved (or incorrectly resolved). You read them to know wt needs uncovering & not to add a summary in ur paper.

[Umair Javed @umairjav]

Can’t find the original tweet but someone made a great point about how India had two great cultural forms for the projection of soft power globally (cinema and cricket) but they’ve decided they’d rather use both to serve the BJP’s domestic political agenda.

[Sahil Rajput @_sahilrajput]

Skill India. The CAG just exposed what INR 10,194 crore of your tax money actually bought.

PMKVY ran from 2015 to 2022. Three phases. INR 14,450 crore outlay. The goal was to skill 1.32 crore youth.

CAG audited it.

Here’s what they found.

95.90 lakh participants under PMKVY 2.0 and 3.0. For 90.66 lakh of them, that’s 94.53%, the bank account field was recorded as zero, null, N/A, or just left blank. Bank accounts were mandatory for Rs 500 DBT payments.

So where did the money go?

The remaining 5.24 lakh who actually had bank details? 12,122 account numbers were repeated across 52,381 people. And some of those accounts were literally “11111111111” and “123456”. Single digit entries. Text. Names. Special characters instead of account numbers.

Now here’s the wild part.

A company called Neelima Moving Pictures (NMP). Not even registered with the Registrar of Companies. This company certified 33,493 people across 8 states in 21 job roles between January and November 2020.

When CAG went looking for NMP in October 2022, the company didn’t exist anymore. They were told it shut down during COVID.

But the photos NMP submitted as training proof? Same batch photo used for Bihar’s Gaya district, UP’s Bahraich and Shravasti, Maharashtra’s Jalgaon, and Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar. Different states. Different batches. Same photo.

Emails sent by CAG for verification? 36.51% bounced. The ones that came back? Many were sent from training partner email IDs, not the actual trainees.

2.72 lakh email addresses were null. Over 3.08 lakh were repeated.

In Bihar, 3 out of 10 training centres were physically shut when inspectors showed up. The portal still showed training was happening.

34 lakh+ certified candidates have still not received their DBT payment. Overall placement rate? Just 41%.

And the official PMKVY website? Try opening https://t.co/IreLqQt9un right now. It doesn’t even load.

INR 10,000 crore spent to skill India’s youth. 94% didn’t even have valid bank accounts on record. Ghost companies certifying thousands with recycled photos. Centres that exist on a portal but are locked on the ground.

This isn’t an allegation. This is the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s own report.

Who is accountable?

[Matt McManus @MattPolProf]

A degree is about education and learning the material for its own sake as much as, if not more than, the final product.

It genuinely frightens me that people seem to be losing sight of that as we race to offshore our thinking to machines.

[Mad Milton @PhilipPanass]

Weird that in all the discourse that this article spawned, none discusses the SYSTEMATIC gutting of public libraries across India in the last two decades. And its consequences for "reading cultures".

[Tony Joseph @tjoseph0010]

A more precise statement: All modern humans have an unbroken lineage of about 300,000 years going back to Africa. All Indians carry a genetic lineage going back about 60,000 years to the arrival of the Out of Africa migrants. All Indians also carry the genetic lineage of the people who would go on to build the Harappan Civilization, a mix of the Out of Africa migrants and later migrants from ancient Iran, going back to perhaps 7,000 years ago. Most Indian population groups also carry the genetic lineage of the Steppe migrations from Central Asia between 2000-1500 BCE that brought Indo-European languages to the subcontinent, as also the East Asian migrations that brought Austro-Asiatic languages after 2000 BCE. Yes, we do carry a long genetic lineage, one that goes far beyond 5000 years, as we are a mix of multiple migrations into India that happened in prehistory.

[Surbhi Kesar @SurbhiKesar]

One has to be anti-development & carry a colonial mindset to say we should accept precarious, bad jobs because things can be worse. It’s a policy choice & we chose a development path subordinated to global capital.
The lack of vision is anti-intellectual & reeks of subordination.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Bridging Asian Memory: Rethinking India’s Act East. My essay : https://t.co/9O4wrO3gWO in which I argue that India’s “Act East” must take inspiration from the arc of historical cosmopolitanism . Through a Goa–Macau lens we rediscover a maritime, plural heritage—one that links Africa, Arabia, India (Goa) , Southeast Asia, China (Macau) and Japan.
#ActEast #IndianOcean #IndoPacific #IndiaDiplomacy #MaritimeAsia #Geopolitics

[K.Diallo ☭ @nyeusi_waasi]

I just want to let you comrades know that Cornell's entire library is open access (no permissions required), and there are many thousands of books 📚

https://t.co/OPMaUzDGix

[Saib Bilaval @SaibBilaval]

"AQI is a colonial construct, Your Honour 😤"

- J Sai Deepak in the Supreme Court while coughing and wheezing

[Ashwin Kumar @akumar_1289]

@DiscourseDancer Same. I held the same hope for Napoleon Einstein in the late 2000s, but alas, that was not to be. Hope he's good wherever he is.

[Garima @btwn_dimensions]

Camus' letter to his primary school teacher after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

[naresh fernandes @tajmahalfoxtrot]

Cycling is only for first world countries, it seems?

[Uday Bhatia @yooday]

Spent my childhood wishing the Indian team were ruthless serial winners; they are now and I can't stand them

[Spencer Beswick @spencerbeswick]

Roland Barthes: "Anti-intellectualism is a historical myth, linked no doubt to the rise of the petite-bourgeoisie... yet its *political* danger must not be overlooked: it is quite simply fascism, whose first objective always and everywhere is to liquidate the intellectual class."