Pankaj Kakkar

Dad. Husband. Nerd. Code monkey. Singer. Musician. Proud Never-Trumper. Even prouder Never-Modi, since 2002.

He/Him.

All opinions personal.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

Just joined 🟦🌤️! Follow me there: https://t.co/v7LQymt7ui

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

I testified yesterday at a hearing, again about immigrants and crime. Nothing makes the Republicans more infuriated than pointing out that immigrants lower the crime rate.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

We are literally fighting for the future of the American Republic in every election.

I have ZERO patience for egotistical cry babies like Crockett in the Democratic party.

[Jamie! 💛🪷 @TheMarschallin]

I do not fucking understand the people who seem to think Talarico’s victory hinges on what Crockett does with her time and energy. Wasn’t he supposed to be the stronger candidate who didn’t need any help? What happened to that?

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@Yael4Hanover The RSS is a hateful organization with a bigoted, monstrous ideology. Mohan Bhagwat is the current face of that ideology. He has no place in a cosmopolitan, multicultural city like NYC.

https://t.co/CvKrWzi82N

[Yael Levin 🇺🇸🇮🇱🗽 @Yael4Hanover]

Mayor Mamdani found time to oppose a Hindu gathering at Madison Square Garden.

Not traffic. Not crime. A Hindu event.

He is Muslim. Fine. He does not get to decide which faiths are allowed in the room.

Jews already know the pattern. Hindus just got the memo.

Christians should stop pretending they are exempt.

Quote this and tag someone who still calls him “inclusive.”

@NYCMayor

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

RSS's 2nd chief, M.S. Golwalkar, In his 1939 work, praised Germany for "purging the country of the semitic Races - the Jews" to maintain racial purity and suggested that India should learn from this approach regarding the assimilation of different cultures.

[Yael Levin 🇺🇸🇮🇱🗽 @Yael4Hanover]

Mayor Mamdani found time to oppose a Hindu gathering at Madison Square Garden.

Not traffic. Not crime. A Hindu event.

He is Muslim. Fine. He does not get to decide which faiths are allowed in the room.

Jews already know the pattern. Hindus just got the memo.

Christians should stop pretending they are exempt.

Quote this and tag someone who still calls him “inclusive.”

@NYCMayor

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

And here's Savarkar, another RSS hero.

These aren't people you want to be defending, @Yael4Hanover.

https://t.co/CvKrWzi82N

[Yael Levin 🇺🇸🇮🇱🗽 @Yael4Hanover]

Mayor Mamdani found time to oppose a Hindu gathering at Madison Square Garden.

Not traffic. Not crime. A Hindu event.

He is Muslim. Fine. He does not get to decide which faiths are allowed in the room.

Jews already know the pattern. Hindus just got the memo.

Christians should stop pretending they are exempt.

Quote this and tag someone who still calls him “inclusive.”

@NYCMayor

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

When will people understand that this Senator simply does not understand basic economics?

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

We should all be worried about "dynamic pricing."

That's when companies change their prices in real time.

If it's hot out, the cost of ice cream could go up.
If it's cold, tea bags could go up.

It's a way for giant companies to squeeze you even more.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

This is a terrible take. Agarwals and Brilliant existed well before Kota took off, and had the same prep formula. Accessible to anyone with a mailbox.

And Halliday/Resnick was assigned in my little Ajmer school by our CBSE Physics teacher. It was quite well known. So was Irodov.

[Akash Sampurnanand Pandey @late_bloomer_7]

Before Kota, the IIT-JEE was purely elitist. Not by design, but by access.

If you weren't from South Delhi or South Bombay, you didn't even know Irodov or Halliday, Resnick and Walker existed. No local teacher knew the exam's pattern.

You were competing blindly against the children of professors and civil servants who had the secret playbook.

Early IIT demographic data was blunt: a thin, urban, English-speaking elite. Most AIR 1 from 1960 to 1990 came from influential families.

Then Kota reverse-engineered the code and sold it to the public.

Daily problem sheets. Pattern drills. Standardized shortcuts. A brute-force playbook that didn't care about your surname, your school, or your spoken English.

Did Kota turn test-prep into an ugly, soul-crushing factory? Absolutely.

But for millions of small-town kids, that factory was the only door in the wall. The old elite complained that Kota killed the spirit of real engineering

What it actually killed was their monopoly

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

Obama's DOJ found Brown attacked the cop, struggled over his gun, and charged at him. Physical evidence contradicted "hands up, don't shoot." Self-defense justified the shooting. Not a murder, no federal charges or indictment.

I no longer find Tlaib credible. Crap like this.

[Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib @RepRashida]

Mike Brown should still be with us today.

But 12 years ago this week, he was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson. Our fight for justice and an end to white supremacy, police violence, and mass incarceration continues.

Black lives matter.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

It's also one where those 80% are wrong. Man we are really starting to throw the progress baby out with the populist bathwater. The job of elected people isn't to blindly follow the populace, it is to do the considered and reasoned right thing.

[Wajahat Ali @WajahatAli]

This is an 80-20 issue that united Dems and Republicans.

Americans HATE AI Data Centers.

@neeratanden, can you please counsel Crowley to moderate on this issue? Why give Republicans an opening?

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

Terrible take, especially wrt Sam and Priya. The latter was domineering, controlling and manipulative, not loving.

[Gaurav Sabnis @gauravsabnis]

Sid crushes on older lady & throws tantrum when she says no.
Sam walks away from a loving girlfriend for his buddies, goes for arranged marriage.
Akash pursues engaged woman, lands up at her wedding to disrupt it.

Dil Chahta Hai was creepy men in Mercedes.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

This tweet is in keeping with Katie Miller's character, and says more about her than it does about Fauci.

She and her husband are ungrateful and disloyal ghouls, who will say and do anything to further their racist goals.

[Katie Miller @KatieMiller]

Every man who has a journal is a narcissist.

Dr. Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself.

As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

I can say with certainty after witnessing his con up close this man should be in prison.

Justice for the American People.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@carney @JamesSurowiecki No, the opposite is a loyalty oath to Trump; affirming the truth is just a sanity check.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@chertz or it happens through third parties making judgements about who gets what care. Either way, health care eventually does get rationed.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@chertz These are all limited resources. So yes, someone has to say no at some point. Either that happens through the best doctors raising prices, and the best and newest drugs being priced out of most people's range, ...

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@DashKostka And that's exactly how insurance works. You buy health insurance in your 20s, you get it super cheap. In your 50s OTOH with maybe high bp or cholesterol, you pay a lot more, if at all still insurable.

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

Can't find anything about this anywhere else, so just going off of this tweet ... but Jeffrey implies that "conservative" now means being openly racist and Islamophobic. "Awful". But conservative by implication from the opening tweet, nevertheless.

[Jeffrey Sachs @JeffreyASachs]

Let's see, who else? Here's a pretty straightforward one. Laura Covino was fired by Emory in 2019 for maintaining a private blog devoted to some really awful views. Pro-white, anti-Muslim type stuff. Again: awful! But protected.
https://t.co/11dAKW5o2K

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@BirdGuySky @JamesSurowiecki I think this is *exactly* what happened. Non runners don't really get that running pace is measured in mpm not mph.

[Pankaj Kakkar @CoderPankaj]

@FanSince09 @ChrisCillizza