Lk Gupta

Artist 🎨 🎶

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

It takes ₹0 to retweet art.

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@bainjal Recall how in the middle of the first CJP protest the PM was wishing Pradhan happy birthday and a job well done.

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

How heartwarming is this!

[Stanford University @Stanford]

The most important briefings of the day.

Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his kids.

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@PNRai1 Same old tired formula - discredit any anti-bjp movement with a conspiracy theory about international actors and deep state and what not. Bleh!

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@kapsology Get all protesters to bring their own whistles. Do the slogans in certain beats that can be punctuated by protester's whistles blown in unison. Like the chant of "India-India" in cricket stadiums. Just drown out the police whistles.

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

It’s a very big problem. A certain section—not just the BJP—another party thinks “saving India, saving constitution” is only their job. They are self-declared liberals and self-declared thekedars of the constitution.

It’s a very salty ecosystem, acting worse than the BJP’s ecosystem sometimes. They must realise that they can’t divide and rule through such tactics. Their massive failures over the years has led us to this moment where the young have to show the way. So they should just zip it on us and focus on how to support the young! Total buffoons!

[Lynne @_ayandamay]

Just saw a woman say she’s going to start bringing laxatives to bars because men just leave their drinks unattended and if we don’t get to feel safe doing something because of them, they shouldn’t get to either.

[RT @RT_com]

China MAN CREATES ‘DOG-BEATING STICK’ that SMACKS STRAY DOGS in FACE and BODY as they CHASE HIS BIKE

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@ShefVaidya @RahulGandhi Er... Manipur.

[Siddharth's Echelon @SiddharthKG7]

Ye duniya ke sabse bade rocket se satellites launch ho rahe hain. Saath me ye reusable bhi hai. Abhi tak ki capabilities se 3-4 guna zyada hai. Huge step in human space exploration.

It is embarrassing ke ab bhi hum meri raashi ka mangal shani kar rahe hain aur lage hain 150 feet ke statues banane me. Late ho gaye hain already itna.

[Ranvijay Singh @ranvijaylive]

पाक‍िस्‍तान में चुनाव आयुक्‍त की ब‍िट‍िया रानी ने एक निर्दोष को जेल भि‍जवा द‍िया.

बाद में ब‍िट‍िया रानी का केस पाक‍िस्‍तान के सुप्रीम कोर्ट पहुंचा, जहां ब‍िट‍िया रानी को VIP ट्रीटमेंट म‍िला.

ब‍िट‍िया रानी को उसकी पसंद का जज म‍िला, सुनवाई का ऑड‍ियो म्‍यूट कर द‍िया गया. ब‍िट‍िया रानी के पक्ष में आदेश भी आया.

मतलब फुल स्‍पेशल ट्रीटमेंट, वो भी पाक‍िस्‍तान के सुप्रीम कोर्ट में.

अच्‍छा है भारत में ऐसा नहीं होता, अपने यहां लोकतंत्र है, स‍िस्‍टम अभी भी सबके ल‍िए बराबर है.

इसल‍िए कहता हूं - लोकतंत्र जरूरी है. वरना हमारा हाल भी पाक‍िस्‍तान जैसा हो जाएगा - जहां कोर्ट से लेकर चुनाव आयोग तक, सब ब‍िक चुके हैं.

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

PLEASE READ. THIS IS IMPORTANT. SEE HOW YOUR TAX MONEY IS WASTED ON FRAUD PSEUDOSCIENCE STUDIES BY THE BJP GOVERNMENT.

The study did not demonstrate added benefit, and its claim of prolonged safety is a lie.

No demonstrated benefit
Ashwagandha did not produce a statistically convincing improvement in antibody responses, COVID-19 prevention or quality of life. There were 27 infections among 598 Ashwagandha recipients and 20 among 602 placebo recipients. This does not demonstrate protection.

Some numbers are mathematically impossible
The same supplement reports a spread (standard deviation) of 13.8 for a questionnaire score that mathematically cannot have a spread larger than about 10.8–12 — like reporting that everyone in a room is between 5 and 6 feet tall, with an average variation of 2 feet. Elsewhere, the placebo group’s heights supposedly vary by 17–22 cm while every other group varies by 9–10 cm; the odds of that happening in a real randomized trial are about one in a trillion trillion trillion.

The one “positive” result is an illusion created by math
The abstract says the Ashwagandha group showed “persistently higher” antibody levels in one subgroup. The paper’s own Table 2 shows the opposite: that group’s actual antibody levels were lower at every single time point. The “20–40% higher” claim comes from measuring change from each group’s starting point — and the Ashwagandha group happened to start 25–34% lower, so its catch-up looks bigger as a percentage. It is like two runners: one starts 10 metres behind and both finish together; you then praise the trailing runner for “gaining more metres.” That is not a drug effect; it is an accounting artifact. The paper never tells readers this.

The safety story is a lie and the bad bits were left out
“Safe” in this paper means “no statistically proven difference in harms” - but the trial was not designed to detect rare or moderate harms, and every actual number tilts against the herb: more adverse events (337 vs 309), more serious adverse events (6 vs 2), more probably drug-related events (7 vs 2), and more dropouts (92 vs 76) in the Ashwagandha arm. Some numbers were simply misreported: serious reactions are listed as “0.08%” when the real figure is 0.67% - ten times higher. Significant differences in blood tests (including D-dimer, a clotting marker that matters after an adenovirus-based vaccine like Covishield) appear in the tables but are never mentioned in the text, which instead says all lab results stayed normal. And 168 people (14%) left the trial for “various reasons” that are never itemized, so the claim that “no one quit because of side effects” cannot be checked.

Basic numbers and statistical tests do not agree.
Nobody can say how many people were actually in the trial. The text reports 11 symptomatic COVID-19 infections, while the adverse-event table reports 22. Depending on which table you read, the same 1,200 participants split into subgroups four different, mutually contradictory ways (the totals come out as 1,200, 1,194, 1,019-labelled-as-919, and 1,025). One trial cannot have four different headcounts. Dropout rates also varied bizarrely between recruitment waves - 23.7% in one group versus 5.4% in another, with no explanation. Some statistical test results cannot be reproduced from the printed counts.

Some laboratory data require urgent verification. Some of the data were literally copied and pasted.
In the paper’s quality-of-life supplement, one column of numbers (baseline results for the Ashwagandha group) reappears — digit for digit, all eight values — as a completely different column (week-28 results for the placebo group). Two different groups of people, measured six months apart, do not produce identical results down to the second decimal place. This is a copy-paste job, and it means at least one of those columns is not real data. One table reports a very large difference in blood urea between groups, with small variation within each group, yet gives a statistical result suggesting little difference. The corresponding urea-nitrogen value also does not fit. In the quality-of-life supplement, four pairs of averages and measures of variation are repeated exactly across different groups and visits.

Ashwagandha's quality documents do not consistently support their own claims.
A raw-root test reports 0.048% total alkaloids against its stated minimum of 0.3%, while declaring compliance. Those statements cannot all be correct. The extract and finished-tablet measurements also do not reconcile on the obvious calculation. Chromatograms dated 2019 are supplied for a trial that began enrolling in late 2021, without showing their connection to the actual trial batches. This means the documentation is insufficient to verify what participants received.

The goalposts were moved after the results came in
When the trial was registered in 2021, its main question was whether Ashwagandha improves the immune response to the vaccine. The answer came back: no measurable effect. So the published paper re-centred itself on a secondary question — safety — and put “safe” in the title, while demoting the original main question to “exploratory.” That is called outcome switching, and trial registration exists precisely to prevent it. Along the way, the eligible age range quietly changed three times across documents (18–45, then 18–65, then 18–70), a planned interim analysis vanished, and the timeline described in the paper contradicts the registry.

The paper hid the fact that the two groups were not comparable
A fair trial needs the treated group and the placebo group to start out the same. At the start of this trial, 77.6% of the placebo group had signs of a past COVID infection, versus 70.9% of the Ashwagandha group — a real, statistically significant difference (the correct p-value is about 0.01). The paper’s own Table 1 says so. But the text of the paper claims the groups were “comparable” and quotes a p-value of 0.50 - wrong by a factor of fifty, and wrong in the direction that hides the problem. Why it matters: the group with fewer past infections (Ashwagandha) would be expected to look different on later antibody tests anyway, which muddies every comparison the paper makes about immunity and breakthrough infections.

The published paper contains fabricated-looking data blocks, impossible statistics, a fifty-fold misreported p-value that hides an unfair comparison, a main result replaced by a secondary one after the fact, and a headline “benefit” that its own tables disprove.
https://t.co/jXY9Q75PMM

A letter to the journal's Science Integrity Department WILL BE MAILED TODAY with the following concerns about this paper @FrontiersIn

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@Schandillia Stray cows and dogs

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

Whenever these guys tweet anything go straight to the comments section 🤣

[BJP @BJP4India]

यात्रीगण कृपया ध्यान दें... अगला स्टेशन है मोदी युग!

देखिए, विकास की ये झलक… नए भारत की झलक! ⬇️

#SevaSankalpAbhiyan

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@raggedtag Yeah me too, but I've heard people say id-eo-logy

[Aabhas Maldahiyar 🇮🇳 @Aabhas24]

“Just ask ChatGPT, and the vanishing mind”

https://t.co/4s9nSMugrw

My latest Op-Ed in @IndiaToday where I share my concern for probable “involution” of Homo-Sapiens. I argue—

For millions of years, human evolution rewarded us for thinking. Our brains grew larger because survival demanded memory, imagination, problem-solving, judgement and invention.

Now we have reached a peculiar point in evolution: we are building machines to do the thinking, and then congratulating ourselves for becoming faster at not thinking.

The most disturbing example may be staring us in the face in architecture.

First, architects stopped drawing and started scrolling Pinterest.

Then Pinterest became the design library.

Then AI arrived and became the junior architect who never sleeps, never asks for a fee and can produce fifty “concepts” before lunch.

So now we have a remarkable workflow: find someone else’s building on Pinterest, feed it to AI, generate ten variations, add some curves, call it a concept, and present it as design thinking.

Except it isn’t thinking.

Architecture was once an exercise in observation, memory, proportion, climate, structure, material, culture and human behaviour. You had to dabble with a problem before you could solve it.

Now the “dabble” renamed as “struggle” itself is being outsourced.

And architecture is only the visible symptom.

Students summarise books they never read. Writers generate thoughts they never wrestled with. Professionals ask machines to explain things they could once have learnt themselves. We increasingly want the answer without enduring the intellectual labour that makes the answer meaningful.

That should concern us far more than whether AI will replace humans.

What if humans begin replacing the part of themselves that made them human?

The great story of evolution was that our brains became powerful enough to overcome problems.

The strange story we may now be writing is that, having built machines capable of solving those problems, we are voluntarily surrendering the need to solve them ourselves.

The machines may be getting smarter.

We need to ask whether we are getting intellectually lazier. And larger question remains— down the line in two decades will we have brains smart enough to put the right prompts?

Read details in the piece.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

The reason there is so little racism in Japan is simple: Japanese people basically dislike everyone.

Race has nothing to do with it. We just do not want to deal with other human beings.

That is why we carefully follow manners and social rules, so we can avoid bothering one another and keep interaction to a minimum.

This is who Japanese people really are, and it is the complete opposite of Americans.

Forget hugs and handshakes. We do not even want to make eye contact. Ideally, nobody would come within 15 feet of us.

We are already crammed together on this tiny island. Everyone has had enough.

Understanding this is the single biggest key to understanding Japanese people.

[Lk Gupta @Lk_Gupta]

@DeepikaBhardwaj Great work Deepika! Proud of you. More power to you.

[Sanjay Jha @JhaSanjay]

Rahul Gandhi is having the last laugh. And some journalists, long acculturated to the Delhi Darbar of the Shahenshah, can’t handle it. It happens. The BJP is obviously sulking.

A friend forwarded me a wonderfully grumpy tweet from an establishment journalist, scandalised that Rahul Gandhi dared to spoof He Who Cannot Be Named with a stand-up comedian.

Ah, Lady Socrates has spoken.

After twelve years in which large sections of India’s Fourth Estate discovered that the spine was apparently an optional organ, we are now being given masterclasses in political propriety.

Please.

You helped turn journalism into something resembling the promotional trailer of an Aditya Dhar potboiler: booming background score, heroic lighting, breathless nationalism and remarkably few awkward questions.

And now a joke is a constitutional crisis? The sanctity of a PM’s position is being muddied etc etc. Seriously?

Smell the Starbucks: 2026 has changed the political conversation. The drawing room has changed. The street has changed. The digital universe has changed. Humour is in. Roasting is in. Politicians getting spoofed is in: it is a good thing. We take these guys more seriously than we should.

Democracy could use a laugh.

It is certainly healthier than abuse, intimidation, and the dreary name-calling that passed for political discourse for years. And your daily hate-filled asperity which passed off as primetime news.

The difficulty, of course, is anatomical. Twelve years of bending over backwards can produce a nasty curvature of the spine. Straightening up suddenly causes cracking, creaking, and apparently, furious tweets.

So laugh, Lady Socrates. Try it.

Money can buy access.
Power can buy applause.
But neither can buy moral authority.

And while you contemplate that philosophical puzzle, have a crispy Delhi samosa.

It could be a chilly winter.

[Mohan Sinha 🇮🇳 @Mohansinha]

Two groups of politicians are harming the country: those who back the protests on reservations and education, and those who stay silent due to their political compulsions..
Twenty or thirty years from now, long after Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi, and the rest who are busy taking sides are gone, this country will produce its first full batch of poorly educated graduates, if we let things slide the way they are.
People who talk easily about brain drain should first ask why it happens. Is it a weak education system, a lack of real opportunities, or an unfair examination process?
As a parent, I know the cost. I am still paying heavily for sending my son through some of the best institutions abroad. After Class 12 he sat for CET and other exams and saw despairingly what he was up against.
As a general-category student he had almost no chance of a medical college seat unless he scored in the 99.99 percentile. And often. not even then. He and his mother looked at private institutions in India and abroad. It meant handing our home and our future to the bank because otherwise on our meagre salaries and savings he didn’t stand a chance.
With help from his mother, he chose another subject that let him think and explore, and he loved it.
Once, on a short holiday at home, he said something that was both revealing and frustrating. In India, when he asked a professor during graduation why they were studying a topic, the answer was: “Because it is in the syllabus.”
In Europe, in the first year of his Master’s, he asked the same question. The professor told him to wait till the lecture ended. Then he sat him down and spent an hour explaining the reasons, the strengths, and the limits of what they were learning.
“I knew I had to unlearn most of what I did in college,” my son said. “The days of rote learning were over. And I never felt better.”
Circa 2026, I’m still working, a decade past my retirement age, to pay off the education loan. But it’s been worth it.
The IITs and IIMs produce the best brains in the country and the world. Don’t destroy them for your petty political gains.