Debashish Mukerji

Author and journalist, firmly in the libtard, sicular camp.

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@kkstau That's your North India experience speaking. In Mumbai, people have always formed orderly queues for everything.

[Ankur Bhardwaj @Bhayankur]

Either boycott tournaments involving Pakistan, or enter them and observe the basic sporting formalities. Winning a final and then refusing the trophy on the BCCI’s orders is not a principled stand.
It is churlish political theatre.

[Ankur Bhardwaj @Bhayankur]

With this menu, even I would skip it and order food after going back to my room. And I am a vegetarian.

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@VKrishnaAnanth Rath yatra, sorry. Damn auto correct

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@VKrishnaAnanth I grew up in Bombay and found the Bombay parts 100% authentic. Also the main character's marriage breaking over Advani's rather Batra was such a brilliant touch

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@VKrishnaAnanth I also felt it was very, very authentic. Have visited railway colonies, though never lived in one. The author is in his 40s, so it's all research, not lived experience!

[Shinie Antony @shinieantony]

Delightfully strange :)

[Madhavan Narayanan @madversity]

An elaborate media campaign has been mounted to defend India's #GDPdata released by the Modi government. Some Indian economists are showing technical details and displaying their usual lack of linguistic clarity. (Unlike US/UK economists who know regular conversational English)
But the real issue here is the lack of disclosure on the shift in methodology of estimation of data. This is like redrawing the map of an electoral constituency, claiming victory, but not clearly saying where the map has been redrawn. Disclosure of both data sets would work in an ethical transition.
You can't discuss a communication problem with economic logic. Remember, GDP is estimated, not calculated. That leaves room for manoeuvre. Let's wait for Moody's and S&P versions (and be prepared for them to be described as biased Westerners)

[Amit Schandillia @Schandillia]

To paraphrase, people are discussing the morality of jauhar instead of discussing the depravity of the invaders. Couldn’t have put it better.

[Sanjay Sivadas @sivadasanjay]

@Vasudha156 https://t.co/oi36LxyuZa

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@Memesociiety_ But the historical truth is the opposite. Mallus are the only community in India who began converting from the 1st century CE, when St Thomas came to India. Most "Syrian Christians" are former Brahmins. Same cannot be said about other Christians

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@miragechazer101 @kookykarthik @PhilipPanass And Konyak at that, really disadvantaged tribe, unlike say Aos and Angamis, who have a tradition of education

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@PhilipPanass Having been to Mon and Tuensang, where the Konyak tribe hails from (albeit many years ago), seen how backward these areas are, I feel there's no harm in a bit of DEI support for this lady. Also, most likely she's a Christian, and unlikely to be a Hindutva bhakt

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@vijayshan Rajaji? Anna? Never read Rajaji's retelling of Ramayana and Mahabharat in English? What nonsense is all this?
More crucial is that Keerthana has given interviews in Hindi. For Tamil Nadu, that's the real change under Vijay

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@CjvFanatic Rajaji wrote books in English. Anna delivered all his Rajya Sabha speeches in English. Jayalalitha's convent school accent is remembered by all. What are you even talking about?

[Debashish Mukerji @ashishdeb100]

@greatbong @BBC What rot. The Operation West End sting was in 2001 when BJP was in power with Vajpayee as PM

[Dan Qayyum @DanQayyum]

'When Modi clicks his fingers they come running.'

Listen to how BJP brought Bollywood to heel through cases, intimidation, and blackmail.

@SreenivasanJain with @mehdirhasan on @zeteo_news

[Swarajya @SwarajyaMag]

Some votes a national party just can't buy. The BJP is learning this the hard way in UP.

Start with who the Kurmis are.
- UP's second-largest OBC group after the Yadavs, about 7 to 10% of the state.
- Packed tightly enough to decide 30 to 40 seats.
- Backed the NDA for 10 years.
- NDA's Kurmi vote has slid from 80% in 2019 to 66% in 2022 to 61% in 2024.

You can see it in who got elected too. UP sent 11 Kurmi MPs to Parliament in 2024. Seven were from the Samajwadi Party. Only three were from the BJP.

Here's the odd part. The BJP has an ally, Anupriya Patel's Apna Dal, whose whole job is to hold the Kurmi vote for it. The vote is leaving anyway.

Why? Because the SP did something the BJP structurally couldn't.

- SP let local Kurmi leaders build their own following.
- It picked up district-level leaders from the BSP, gave them tickets, and ran them straight at the BJP.
- In three seats it put up a Kurmi against a BJP Brahmin. It won all three.

The BJP can't copy this easily. It's a national party with a fixed ideology. It won't bend to one caste, and it won't let a local leader grow into his own power centre.

As one BJP leader put it – Kurmis follow their caste leaders, not a party. And the BJP makes it hard for such a leader to rise from inside.

That's what the ally, Apna Dal, was for. But it only delivers around Mirzapur. Even there, Anupriya Patel's own win margin crashed from 2.3 lakh votes in 2019 to 38,000 in 2024.

And now the ally is walking away from its own job. After some internal splits, Apna Dal has made a Dalit its state chief and told workers to stop being a Kurmi-only party.

So the BJP did what national parties do. It fixed things from the top. In December it made a Kurmi MP, Pankaj Chaudhary, its state president. But his team looked handpicked by the central leadership, not by him, so the message fell flat.

The lesson is bigger than one caste or one state.

@nishthaanushree in @SwarajyaMag on why every fix the BJP has tried to fix the slide in Kurmi vote has failed, and what it means for 2027 — https://t.co/6m0Bt3nvZF

[Joy Bhattacharjya @joybhattacharj]

A great story narrated by novelist John Irving which got even better when I researched the context.
"A student of mine at Iowa—a brilliant fellow, academically; he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in something I can't even pronounce or spell—wrote an accomplished, lucid short story about a dinner party from the point of view of the hostess's fork.If you think this sounds fascinating, my case is already lost. Indeed, the young writer's fellow students worshiped this story and the young genius who wrote it; they regarded my all-too-apparent indifference to the fork story as an insult not only to the author but to all of them.
Ah, to almost all of them, for I was saved by a most unlikely and usually most silent member of the class. He was an Indian from Kerala, a devout Christian, and his accent and word order caused him to be treated dismissively—as someone who was struggling with English as a second language, although this was not the case.
English was his first language, and he spoke and wrote it very well; the unfamiliarity of his accent and the cadence, even of his written sentences, made the other students regard him lightly. Into the sea of approval that the fork story was receiving, and while my "but . . ." was repeatedly drowned out by the boisterous air of celebration in the class, the Indian Christian from Kerala said, "Excuse me, but perhaps I would have been moved if I were a fork. Unfortunately, I am merely a human being."
That day, and perhaps forever after, he should have been the teacher and I should have given my complete attention to him. He is not a writer these days, except on the faithful Christmas cards he sends from India, where he is a doctor.
Under the usual holiday greetings, and the annual photograph of his increasing family, he writes in a firm, readable hand: "Still merely a human being."On my Christmas cards to him, I write: "Not yet a fork."
And now for the kicker. After a little digging, I figured out that the student from Kerala in question was actually the physician and novelist Abraham Verghese who went on to write the amazing 'Cutting for Stone' in 2008, 12 years after this extract was first published.