kaberi bhattacharya

[Tara Deshpande @Tara_Deshpande]

Let them investigate and prove beyond a doubt their lunacy.
The court chronicle Padshahnama notes that Shah Jahan acquired a riverside property in Agra from the ruler of Amber, Raja Jai Singh I, in a barter exchange.
A farman (royal decree) of Shah Jahan dated 28 December 1633.
records that four havelis (mansions) were handed to Raja Jai Singh in exchange for the haveli (estate) that had belonged to his grandfather, Raja Man Singh I, on the site where the Taj Mahal was to be built.
Prayers are offered in the mosque built opposite the Taj so no question of disallowing prayers.

[Sandeep Manudhane @sandeep_PT]

As I wrote earlier, ISRO will be stripped to the bones, and the riches handed over to private companies for peanuts.

[Varun Guru @iamvarunguru]

This is Anagha Rajesh.

And she is crazy.

She wants to store data in bacterial DNA.

Her startup is called BioCompute.

And last year, they actually did it.

They stored data in DNA and retrieved it in their tiny lab in Bengaluru.

This is a huge moment.

But why is she even doing it?

Because DNA is the ultimate storage tool available to us.

Just 1 gm of DNA can store about 215 petabytes of data - that's like storing over 2 million movies in 4K.

On top of that - this data can last for literally 1000s of years.

Right now, they still need to figure out a way to make the reading and writing process faster and cheaper.

But if BioCompute solves this problem - we could theoretically store all the data created in the world every year in the palm of our hands.

And that would be insane.

P.S. Check out this video from @vy0mbhatia going to Anagha's lab and actually doing it.

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

#MustRead story by @vijaita on census entries being changed. This is more egregious than massaging the numbers, this is poisoning data at its source and has bearing on Indian data's international credibility.

[Roshan Kishore @Roshanjnu]

A long post on West Bengal politics. Link in next tweet

[Sam Dalrymple @SamDalrymple123]

The World of the Indo Greeks

I have long been fascinated by Gandharan art and the way it fuses Greco-Roman techniques with Indic subjects. But its origins are far more fascinating than most people realise...

[kaberi bhattacharya @kabbhat]

@thatssodhawal This is a very subtle truth that no-one brings out into the open.

[Manasa Manjunath @ManeeManjunath]

Middle class Indians have stood by Modi ji and his government through demonetisation, through fuel prices being at ₹100 even while crude was at its lowest in years, paid that same price for E10 and then E20 as it shortened their engines’ & cars lives, through pot hole ridden roads, terrible air quality, dirty water and taxes on every single investment.

Even as bureaucratic corruption thrives and bleeds the average Indian dry and the same man who said, “Na Khaonga, na khane dunga”, asks for yet another sacrifice from them in the name of patriotism. Please take your outrage elsewhere. The average Indian pays sacrifices more than necessary for the nation, let the politicians and babus who live on taxpayer money lead by example on austerity. Strip them of their privileges, have every single one of them go under the ED radar and then talk.

[kaberi bhattacharya @kabbhat]

@TommiPedruzzi Send.

[kaberi bhattacharya @kabbhat]

@hvgoenka " cohesive social climate " ??

[kaberi bhattacharya @kabbhat]

@curiouswavefn 🤣🤣🤣

[Dr. Brahma Chellaney @Chellaney]

Trump's naval blockade of Iran is obscuring his other blockade — the one against Cuba that has entered its fourth month and is causing a worsening humanitarian crisis marked by blackouts, water scarcity, failing hospitals and food shortages.

The current U.S. strategy is the first time a modern superpower has used simultaneous, open-ended naval blockades as a primary coercive tool against two separate nations in different hemispheres during peacetime or while a ceasefire is in effect.

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Why Did Sridhar Vembu Really Come to India?

The story you've been sold: A billionaire tech entrepreneur renounces Silicon Valley, returns to a Tamil Nadu village, lives simply, cycles to work, talks about dharma and reversing brain drain. Simple living, high thinking. A saint in a cotton shirt.

The story the California courts tell: He moved to India in late 2019. Filed for divorce in 2021. In between, he transferred ownership of Zoho's US subsidiary to entities controlled by his associate Tony Thomas and his sister Radha Vembu, who now holds an estimated 47.8% stake in the company, without his wife's knowledge or consent.

A California court didn't mince words. It found that Vembu had acted "without regard for respondent's interests in community assets and without regard for the law." It ordered him to post a $1.7 billion bond. Unprecedented, the court itself said.

His wife Pramila Srinivasan, who by her own account supported the household in Zoho's early years and was kept in the dark about the ownership restructuring, is still fighting the case in California. Their son, who has autism and requires lifelong care, lives with her in the Bay Area. He is 26 years old.

Vembu left him behind.

The move to rural India wasn't a philosophical act. It was a jurisdictional one. California's community property law requires marital assets to be split equally in a divorce.

The solution, apparently, was to move the assets and himself out of California's reach before the divorce became formal. The village was the alibi. The dharma was the disguise. This is the conclusion the evidence points to.

The trial is not yet concluded and Vembu has denied all allegations, calling them complete fiction. But the court, looking at the same evidence, found his explanations not credible.

And then came the reward. The Modi government gave him the Padma Shri on January 26, 2021 and appointed him to the National Security Advisory Board just days later, in February 2021.

The formal divorce filing came in August that year. The government honoured him while the marriage was already in ruins and the asset transfers were already underway.

But the courts and the Padma Shri are almost secondary. The real villainy is what he did to millions of ordinary Indians who believed him.

The man built an entire public persona on selflessness, on the idea that he had walked away from wealth and comfort for the sake of rural youth, for India, for something larger than himself. People quoted him. Teachers cited him. Young men from small towns looked up to him.

It was a performance.

Underneath the saint was a man who had abandoned his wife of nearly three decades, walked away from a son who needed him, moved a billion dollar empire out of legal reach, and dressed the whole operation up as enlightenment.

That is the real story of why Sridhar Vembu came to India.

[Amazing Nature @AmazingNature00]

The universe just pulled off something almost impossible… over Iceland. 🌌🌑

This is the kind of moment that doesn’t just feel rare… it feels unreal.

Seeing the Aurora Borealis is already a bucket-list experience.
Witnessing a Solar Eclipse is rare on its own.

But both… perfectly aligned in the same sky?

That’s the “double crown” — and it might be a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

What looks like pure magic is actually a perfect storm of timing:

✨ A powerful geomagnetic storm ignited vivid auroras across the polar sky
🌑 At the exact same time, the Moon slipped into the Sun’s path of totality
👁️ From the perfect angle, the Sun’s glowing corona formed one crown… while shimmering green auroras painted another behind it

Two crowns. One sky. One fleeting moment.

This is what happens when cosmic precision meets Earth’s atmosphere — a reminder that the universe doesn’t just work in equations… it performs.

And sometimes, if everything aligns just right… we get to witness it.

[Government of India Shadow @GoIShadow]

Modi government has recovered 44,00,000 Crores (Forty Four Lakh Crores) as taxes on fuel in the last 11 years.

Therefore it has been able to write off almost 20,00,000 Crores (Twenty Lakh Crores) of corporate debt in the NCLT route.

The loot at the petrol pump has enabled it to keep the Public Sector Banks afloat.

Your fuel tax has been used to allow people like Anil Ambani to walk away with 99% loan waiver. His debt of 49,000 Crores was settled for 455 Crores,

[Eric Barker @bakadesuyo]

The #1 predictor of lasting relationships isn't compatibility. Or shared interests.

It's validation. And almost nobody does it right.

7 secrets to emotionally intelligent friendships (Stanford research) 🧵

[The Paperclip @Paperclip_In]

Located in the Canadian High Arctic, Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world. In this land of the midnight sun and polar nights, where a handful of Inuit communities endure, you would find a hill named after a Bengali Major. Thread.

1/19

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

Susana Trimarco disguised herself as madam and walked into brothels across northern Argentina, searching for her missing daughter among women trapped in sexual slavery and in the process, she sparked a movement that would free over 3,000 sex trafficking victims. It began in April 2002, when her 23-year-old daughter, María de los Ángeles Verón, left for a doctor's appointment in their city of San Miguel de Tucumán and never returned home. Frustrated by a police investigation she believed was deliberately sabotaged by corruption, Trimarco obtained the names of known pimps and sex traffickers from police files and launched her own search.

She posed as a buyer interested in purchasing the captive women and girls - some as young as 14, who could be traded for about $800. One rape victim told her she had seen María drugged, with swollen eyes, in a trafficker's home that doubled as a holding place for newly abducted women. But by the time Trimarco could follow the lead, her daughter had been moved. Though María was never found, Trimarco's relentless pursuit transformed her into one of Argentina's most powerful human rights activists and forced sex trafficking onto national agenda. "The desperation of a mother blinds you," she says. "It makes you fearless."

Through this dangerous work, Trimarco discovered the full scope of sex trafficking and corruption within the police and judiciary that kept women trapped in forced prostitution. "The police would hand [the trafficked women] back to the criminals," she recalls. "They used to say: 'Don't leave me. Take me with you.'" Trimarco ended up becoming the personal guardian to 129 survivors of sex trafficking, sheltering them in her home and helping them reunite with their families.

Trimarco's relentless advocacy forced change at highest levels. Her work helped lead to first law, passed in 2008, making human trafficking a federal crime; the subsequent reforms have led to thousands of people being rescued from sex traffickers. These successes, however, have come with high personal cost to Trimarco: she has suffered many reprisals over the years including countless death threats, having her house set on fire, and several attempts to run her over in street.

As more trafficking survivors and families of trafficking victims reached out to her for help, Trimarco says, "It came to a point where I just did not have capacity to help them all. That is when I decided to open a foundation." In 2007, she founded Fundación María de los Ángeles, a non-governmental organization focused on helping people escape from trafficking and lobbying for legislation to prevent it. Her efforts focused on her daughter's disappearance eventually resulted in trials for 13 people, including several police officers, in 2012; all 13 were acquitted, a ruling that prompted outrage by many and led to impeachment proceedings against three judges.

In December 2013, Tucumán Supreme Court reversed acquittals and convicted ten of defendants, who received sentences ranging from 10 to 22 years in April 2014. But despite it all, Trimarco still hasn't found out what she wants to know most: what happened to her daughter. Some witnesses say she was murdered - although her body has never been found and others say she was taken overseas.

Twenty-three years later, Trimarco's work continues in her daughter's name and for all survivors. Her foundation remains at the forefront of the country's fight against human trafficking, recently helping to dismantle trafficking rings in 2024 and 2025. In recent years, the foundation has expanded its role as a legal plaintiff in trafficking cases, ensuring survivors have representation throughout the judicial process. Now in her seventies, Trimarco remains internationally recognized for her work, though her search for answers about María's fate has never ceased. "Every woman I help somehow helps María," she reflects. "They represent hope in this new life of mine."

© A Mighty Girl

#drthehistories

[kaberi bhattacharya @kabbhat]

@IAmSudhirMishra She's so beautiful! All the best.