Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social)

education, careers, philanthropy, social change | here mainly for the reading recos | @uoessps alum

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

Books I read/finished reading in 2025 🧵

This is a yearly ritual. I shall be adding to the thread every now and then. May you happily stumble upon something worth your time:

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

CBSE has systematically rewritten its rulebook to favor Coempt Eduteck.

check out the blog.

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

I was investigating tenders for a while now, I was comparing the diffs and I found a shocking pattern of institutional manipulation.

my findings reveal that CBSE has rigged the game.

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

💯

It is also the kind of conservatism where the desire for the novel faces the challenge of the unfamiliar. You may lose yourself without the performance of culture and reminders of shibboleths.

[AnnieZaidi PhD @anniezaidi]

And the problem of the badly behaved domestic tourist abroad is essentially the problem of the same behaviour at home: fear of one's own culture & hegemony being challenged in the smallest way, the need to dominate public space, a lack of curiosity about other people's cultures

[The Athletic | Football @TheAthleticFC]

“My relationship with my club began the same way it does for most football fans: before I was old enough to understand what I was getting myself into. When I was nine, my uncle introduced me to a team with a cannon on its shirt, a grizzled captain named Tony Adams, and players like Nwankwo Kanu who had been born in Africa but now lived somewhere else, just like me. Arsenal felt familiar before I even understood why.

“And then there was the manager, a man who I initially thought had been named after the club and then believed that somehow the club must have been named after him. Arsene Wenger may have struggled with his raincoat, but rarely with his orchestra. The football his teams played sang.

“But what was once the nostalgia of the past has become the beauty of the present.

“We won. We are champions of England. And we are just one game away from being crowned champions of Europe too.”

@ZohranKMamdani, mayor of New York City, writes for The Athletic on what Arsenal means to him.

FREE READ 🔗 https://t.co/ge64qWmVuz

[Madhur @ThePlacardGuy]

India’s internet has been officially split into two classes, and the announcement came from .@airtelindia itself.

Postpaid users now get “priority 5G.” Prepaid users get whatever is left on the same towers, the same spectrum, the same network. The deciding factor is not technology, not infrastructure, not even fairness. It is the size of your monthly bill.

The most dangerous part is not the policy itself, it is the precedent. Once a tiered internet gets normalised in India, every telecom in the market will follow the playbook. First speed will be sold, then app access, then connectivity itself. The open internet that built digital India will disappear quietly, one corporate announcement at a time.

Public spectrum is being sliced by wallet size, and the regulator has not said a word. .@Dot_India @JM_Scindia silence is not neutrality, it is complicity.

[Arjun* @mxtaverse]

The quality of the art matches the infra built by builders there.

[Ekta Chauhan @ekta2993]

Can’t believe 17 years olds have to turn to twitter to get their exam sheets re evaluated. What a failed system.

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

Please Arsenal, do not promote this crappy device.

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

Looking good, Gunners 😎

Trying on our new Oakley Meta glasses 🔥

[Faisal Dilshad @Faisalllll_d]

One of my acquaintances paid the price of being a Muslim in this country. @Uber @Uber_India, the least you can do is ban that driver for the safety of women in this country.

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

Care can make up for incompetence to a certain extent. But what do you do with callous incompetence?

[sunetra choudhury @sunetrac]

Big break by HT @MeSanjayy how cbse went ahead with OSM instead of trying in smaller groups first . Do read

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

I highly recommend former NCERT chief Krishna Kumar’s book ‘Political Agenda of Education’. It really sucks that a lot of things he points to are still pertinent today.

Educational reform needs a historically-informed perspective. Tech can’t solve this—it’ll only things worse.

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

Govt school teaching is seen as government service. The govt school teacher is seen as low-status and non-specialised (reflected in the range of tasks they perform throughout the year). Bureaucratic subordination trumps pedagogy.

[G Sampath @samzsays]

It would have been amazing and refreshing to have had this superbly articulate, smart, dedicated govt school teacher and #CBSE evaluator come to @the_hindu office for the recording. But she was so frightened of repercussions for speaking out, we had to record it online to keep her identity private. So sad that teachers in world's largest democracy don't feel safe expressing their views on matters relating to their job & public accountability. #OSM #cbseboard

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[M K Venu @mkvenu1]

It is utterly perverse that the massive weakening of the Re against US dollar, Euro&Yen past year & half has caused RBI to earn profit from its forex reserves in its balance sheet and this profit (from a weak Re) is being transferred as profit to Centre to cut fiscal deficit!

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

“…no epoch of defeat, however long, is endless There are no lost causes because people keep faith.”

[Mukul Kesavan @mukulkesavan]

The triumph of virtue (or good guys finish first)

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Mumbai, Maharashtra: On the ‘Billionaires For Peace Conclave’, Actor Javed Jaffrey says, "This is a very interesting initiative because at the end of the day, we all know that money runs the world, whether for good or for bad. It is in the hands of those who have money... If they have the right mindset, they can bring about a huge change... Hopefully, this is a collection of billionaires who have not given in to greed and are finding solutions for the people of this world..." (21.05)

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

The (Un)ease of Doing Business in India.

[Mayur Shetty TOI @mayurshetty01]

A reddit post on the ease of doing export business in India

[Jophin Mathai (jofmat.bsky.social) @jofmat]

@tjoseph0010 You could replace it with ‘labour’. Or remove it altogether. Lower value i.e. lower profit margins is the key bit.

[CNBC @CNBC]

Jeff Bezos: "If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving."