Bali Kale

Federer Fan🎾

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

There’s this pill that everyone in their right mind—who wants to criticize the government—has to swallow.

[Naval @naval]

It's not the politicians, it's the voters.

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

Is sport really bigger than the sportsperson?

I’m not so sure.

Wrote down some thoughts on Federer, Kohli, fandom, and what makes us fall in love with a sport.

Read the new #substack piece:
https://t.co/DHgjPEfT9Z

#Sports #Federer #Kohli #Tennis #Cricket #Blog

[Tandy @LFC_Tandy]

Bro what the actual f*ck

[Royal Challengers Bengaluru @RCBTweets]

“𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘺… 𝘯𝘰 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮’𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘰𝘯 3 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘳𝘰𝘸.” 🧿🤩

Wake up babe, Mo Bobat has dropped the line of the season. 😉 🫳🎤

The reactions from the players tell us how much they want it. Here’s more from Mo’s dressing room chat after RCB won back to back trophies two nights ago. 🏆❤️✌️

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

@pumacricket 🤣🤣🤣

[Royal Challengers Bengaluru @RCBTweets]

To whomsoever it may concern 2.0 🙏

[Ramesh Srivats @rameshsrivats]

Looks like there needs to be a slogan change to "Prati Sala Cup Namde".
#RCBvsGT

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

@RCBTweets 🤣🤣🤣

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

@RCBTweets 🤣🤣🤣

[Shailesh @shailesh18_]

Krunal forever grateful 🙏🏼

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

@AbhyudayaMohan Build this man a statue outside chinnaswamy already @RCBTweets

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Look at this map.

Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine.

And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet.

The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers.

What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades.

But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions.

A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest.

A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is.

You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one.

In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said.

It chose the numbers.

The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi.

All forests, on paper.

The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped. 

The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion. 

It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning.

The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency. 

I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to.

This is not a technicality. This is the con.

It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement.

For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant.

They did nothing.

Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it.

The BJP is different.

When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it.

The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real. 

Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated. 

The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally.

CONT++

[Satish Acharya @satishacharya]

Women's 33% quota. #womensquota

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

@Rokhthok_Onkar 😂😂😂

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

😂😂😂

[BHUSHAN MADKE MD🇮🇳 @rashlessdoctor]

A happy news for all MD medicine doctors in Maharashtra

Now there is a tablet for complaints like कस तरी होतेय

[Chase @Chasemaster_VK]

The man who carried RCB for years!

Bowlers used to fear his name more than they fear to get trophies. The man who made impossible shots look like warm ups.

Happy birthday legend @ABdeVilliers17 ❤️
https://t.co/6ZBHp7trN6

[PUMA Cricket @pumacricket]

Champions again? It’s becoming a habit now. ⭐⭐ @RCBTweets

#PUMAxRCB

[Devaiah Bopanna @devaiahPB]

How did some of the smartest men on the planet think they would get away with this Epstein mess? My best guess is that they never predicted inventions like social media, AI and media sans gatekeepers. Their Epstein Debauchery era occurred mostly during the 90s until early 2010s.

They controlled or owned media companies, and definitely had a bunch of PR agents on speed dial to ensure leaks were plugged, if any. Bodies and stories could be buried easily. They could withdraw lucrative ad deals from news networks to keep the stories out and media in check.

They never thought social shaming or social accountability was even possible, and they never thought they would lose control of the narrative. They didn’t expect AI to be able to go through and contextualise millions of pages of documents in no time. They thought everything could be bought.

Crazy to think that growing up, we wanted to be like Bill Gates. Make money. Eradicate diseases. Come to think of it, he did try to eradicate STDs by secretly slipping in some antibiotics.

[Sanket Upadhyay @sanket]

UGC Equity Guidelines.

[Out Of Context Cricket @GemsOfCricket]

Virat Kohli's in ODIs

[Bali Kale @BaliKale21]

Years of Python, still judged by list vs tuple.

#Python #CodingMeme