Kunal Shankar ; He/Him

Columbia Uni/ACJ; words, audio, video; Bylines: Al Jazeera, The Hindu, The Wire, Frontline, TheNewsMinute, Suno India, The World, Views mine

[Kunal Shankar ; He/Him @kunalshankar]

Brilliant video, replugging The Climate Economy episode on #GreatNicobar https://t.co/QCoYlkPgrk

[Kalpana Sharma @kalpana1947]

Regardless of what you think of @RahulGandhi do watch this short film on this #WorldEnvironmentDay2026 on the real cost of destructive development in #AndamanNicobarIslands

[Yashovardhan Jha Azad @yashoazad]

No praise is good enough for this hero duo Riyazuddin and son who emptied their shop of mattresses to spread them on ground - to cushion the fall of people jumping off from the burning hotel in Malvia Nagar. What an act of humanity and quick thinking. In that chaos to think straight and save lives - this hero deserves full compensation by MCD and commendation by the govt and also a public felicitation at a prominent place in Delhi @LtGovDelhi @gupta_rekha

[Col Rajeev Agarwal @Rajeev1421]

Lesson from #Iranwar- global connectivity corridors need to avoid two Cs- Conflict zone and Choke points
Can #IMEC fit the bill? What are the challenges?
My analysis, in @the_hindu
@ambtstirumurti @MEAIndia
@DrSJaishankar @Joyce_Karam
@ChintanResearch

https://t.co/g9PuPokvvQ

[Communist Party ☭ @CPBritain]

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman the world knew as Marilyn Monroe.

While the bourgeois press continues to gape at the ghost of a manufactured icon, the Communist Party of Britain reclaims the intellectual and the comrade.

Her politics were born of the assembly line. From the foster homes of Los Angeles to the Radioplane munitions factory, Monroe’s class consciousness was forged in the heat of proletarian survival. She was a woman of fierce intelligence, possessing an IQ that dwarfed the men who sought to manage her, yet she was reduced to a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded by the parasitic studio system.

The FBI files, which tracked her until her final breath, confirm what the establishment feared - a sex symbol who had read Marx and admired the Chinese Revolution. She was a militant anti-racist who used her platform to shatter the colour bar for Ella Fitzgerald, and she stood firm against the cowardice of the McCarthyite witch hunts when she married the blacklisted playwright Arthur Miller.

We must recognise that Monroe’s struggle was the intersection of class exploitation and patriarchal violence. She was a worker whose labour was her own body, super-exploited by a system that demanded she be beautiful and silent. Her life was a constant act of rebellion against the male gaze of capital. On her 100th birthday, we do not celebrate a "bombshell". We honour a clear-minded socialist who understood that the liberation of her class was inseparable from the liberation of her sex.

Happy Centenary, Comrade Marilyn. The struggle continues.

#MarilynMonroe

[Sasikanth Senthil @s_kanth]

There is a memory I carry with me from my years as a civil servant. It has never left me....
Back then, I had just been transferred as Collector to Mangalore, a city then shadowed by communal violence and a menacing sand mafia. Before I left, word came that the Chief Minister wished to see me personally. It was unusual. Collectors don't typically get called in. I walked into his chamber with a knot in my stomach.
He looked at me, that familiar, unreadable face. Steady. Unhurried.
"Banri…" he said. (Come in.)
"Nimage ondhe kelasa… alli ennum communal aaga baradhu."
(You have only one job there. No communal incident should happen.)
That was it. No preamble. No politics. No performance. Just a Chief Minister, alone with a young IAS officer, telling him exactly what mattered. In that single sentence lived an entire philosophy of governance. one rooted not in optics, but in the protection of ordinary people from extraordinary hatred.

Fifteen days later, Mangalore erupted. Two communal murders, two communities, one city on edge. He called me again. Just as directly.
"DC... Do what is required. Take anyone into custody, even our party people. Don't bother. But stop this within a day."
To a young collector, those words were everything. They were permission. They were protection. They were political will at its most honest.
I have known the contrast too. Under a different dispensation, in a similar crisis, the instruction from the top was the opposite. Do nothing strongly. Let things fester. …That silence said everything about who governs for whom.
Siddaramaiah Ji was never that kind of leader.

He carried government finances in his fingertips and social justice in his spine. He refused to tour places that reeked of feudalism. He spoke plainly, governed sharply, and stood on the side of the last person in the room.
If there was one political figure I have genuinely admired, from the stage and up close, it has been him. His legacy is not in the schemes he launched or the budgets he read. It is in the kind of Chief Minister he chose to be when no one was watching. . On that quiet phone call. In the way he asked a nervous young officer to go out and keep the peace.
And now, as he steps back with the same quiet dignity with which he always led, I find myself moved. He has handled this transition with the grace of someone who always knew that principles outlast positions.
Siddaramaiah Ji....long life, good health, and please keep guiding us. The Congress, and this country, still needs the kind of moral clarity only you carry so naturally.

[Nidhi Razdan @Nidhi]

In a recent piece, Arvind Subramanian has argued that India needs a “change of personnel” to deal with the current economic challenges. He says the problems in the economy are not because of the Iran war but a more fundamental problem which includes a vacuum in decision making. The interview to @DeKoderAI drops tonight 👇

[The Hindu @the_hindu]

#Watch | We are now starting to see the impact of the war in West Asia, and the resultant blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by both the U.S. and Iran. The government has raised petrol and diesel prices after a gap of four years. The price of CNG has been increased. This crisis is showing just how vulnerable India’s energy security is to external shocks. But, is there a fuel we've been sitting on all along that can potentially solve several issues? In this episode of The Climate Economy, @kunalshankar explores Compressed Biogas or CBG, how it is made, why the government is betting big on it, and why India’s ambitious biogas push is struggling.

[Abhijeet Dipke @abhijeet_dipke]

This is the screen recording of our audience demographic which we have shared with media before our account was hacked.

More than 94% of the audience is from India.

Why is a Union Minister @KirenRijiju labelling Indian youth as Pakistani?

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

While celebrity anchors remain busy discussing and distributing “melody,” people in Valsad, Gujarat are battling a severe water crisis. Residents are being forced to climb down wells over 45 feet deep using ropes, just to collect water for daily needs.

[Stanly Johny @johnstanly]

Rubio comes to India at a time when US-Pakistan ties are at its post-Bin Laden peak; when the US is pursuing a new detente with China at any cost; and US policies, from tariffs to wars, are directly hurting the Indian economy and millions of Indians.

[Indira Jaising @IJaising]

V Venkateshan you educate our judges , they must take you seriously , the judiciary belongs to you and me

[Dhanya Rajendran @dhanyarajendran]

In solidarity @SauravDassss

[naresh fernandes @tajmahalfoxtrot]

Congratulations!

[Nitin Sethi @nit_set]

If only the new Tamil Nadu govt follows the law, Section 4 of RTI Act, to suo moto and actively disclose all files and records of the govt on a monthly basis, instead of these video antics that sadly even journalists are falling for..

It could make for a real transparent govt.

[Sandeep Manudhane @sandeep_PT]

Both Abhijit Dipke and Arpit Sharma live outside India, and are building and curating AAP's IAC-2 project - CJP - ensnaring the gullible youth and our 'liberal' journalists.

[Antifa_Ultras @ultras_antifaa]

Fidel Castro giving an interview, 1991.

[Leena Manimekalai @LeenaManimekali]

My stream of thoughts on the electoral results, Tamilnadu Assembly 2026.

“What disturbs me is the possibility that people are gradually being detached from reason itself seduced instead into a kind of mass hysteria packaged as revolution. The language of “change” is deployed everywhere, but stripped of ideological depth, historical understanding, or structural analysis. The performance of disruption is replacing the hard labour of transformation.

And so one cannot help but ask: is this truly change, or merely the simulation of change? A manufactured rupture designed to preserve the very structures it claims to oppose? When politics becomes inseparable from image management and mass emotional engineering, democracy risks becoming less an exercise of collective reasoning and more a theatre of manipulation.

Perhaps the greatest danger is not authoritarianism announcing itself openly, but its arrival disguised as hope, entertainment, and public enthusiasm”

Link in the comments

[Supriya Sahu IAS @supriyasahuias]

The Nilgiri Marten is one of nature’s happiest little secrets, with tiny feet, golden-yellow and chocolate fur, and playful agility leaping through the shola forests like a spark of joy. Found nowhere else on earth except the Western Ghats, this rare endemic beauty brings the spotlight on the precious and irreplaceable mountain ecosystems #wildwednesday #Nilgirimarten #endangered #wildlife incredible capture by
R.Vidhya Vigashini #Endangeredspeciesday 15th May

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

Fabulous sessions at @the_hindu @simats_saveetha Seminar on the West Asian conflict...with some of the most experienced diplomats and experts in the sphere. @ambtstirumurti Amb Talmiz Ahmad @sunjaysudhir @gsachdevajnu @Rajeev1421 @johnstanly @kunalshankar . Address by @Lvnavaneeth

[Manu Joseph @manujosephsan]

In his first speech as Tamil Nadu chief minister, Vijay said that he grew up in poverty, and that he even knows what hunger is. It's bullshit because he was my classmate in the third standard in Loyola School.
His father was a filmmaker who set up his son for a career in films.
It is possible that like most filmmakers his father may have had periods of financial strife but that's not the same as Tamil-grade poverty. A lot of affluent boys confuse being broke with poverty. Two very different things.