@arnabnsg@d_s_thakur I get your sarcasm. Judges ko chutti Leni hai toh sarkari paise par seminar ka bahana kyun banate hain. Take a brea like the rest of the world
During the month long summer break, judges crave for invitations to foreign shores. Attending seminars and conferences abroad are considered official work. Judges get paid a hefty TA/DA and get fancy official protocol with embassy staff bowing and scraping. It’s called a paid working holiday.
The High Commission of India in London has issued a statement condemning "indecorous audience behaviour" after a video from CJI Surya Kant's June 4 lecture at Birkbeck College went viral, showing an attendee attempting to raise questions on dissent in India during an event convened specifically on 'Artificial Intelligence and International Law,' before being cut off by the organiser. The High Commission said differences of opinion are natural in a democracy but must be expressed "in a manner that is civil and respectful."
4/ The same Finance Ministry body refused the project ₹12,230 crore in Viability Gap Funding, telling the ports ministry to dig into its own budget instead — and the govt's own reckoning is that returns are at least 17 years away. For more, read https://t.co/pb9265Nu2A
3/ Barely a year later, the Ministry of Defence — presumably better placed than most to judge what counts as "strategic" — classified the very same project as exactly that.
"Strategic Port?"
1/ The Centre has long called the Great Nicobar port — the biggest piece of the island's ₹81,000-crore project — "strategic," and used that label to deny information on its environmental clearances. Turns out the strategic veneer was an afterthought. 🧵
@airnewsalerts@HardeepSPuri Last time we discovered “gas”in #KGD6 off the coast of Andhra Pradesh, it turned out to be water vapour. So gas has many meanings.
> CBSE invited 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary to help identify security gaps in its IT systems
*insert i am proud to announce linkedin post*
@KingranYama All wings of journalists and economists will support government getting out of the way of development and democracy in India. And of course LIC
Who will investigate why LIC holds 10.8% of Rajesh Exports – a company which so many market voices have flagged as a fraud over the past several years?
Why is LIC the only institutional investor in a company which has had no brokerage coverage for the past five years?
Who was the #MCD deputy commissioner when the #MalviyaNagar building came up. Who was the AE/JE/XEN. Who was the local SHO. Can someone do a bit of doorstepping of these officials? Gamla posting shouldn’t be just for some politician.
Just thinking aloud. No claims made.
This is a Time Magazine Cover from 2011. I reposted @RahulSeeker's tweet yesterday.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this cover.
15 years ago, the world was watching two countries and genuinely could not decide which one would lead the future.
One of them does now. The other has spent the last decade and a half fighting over whose god is bigger.
I am writing this as a common citizen who grew up in this country, who continues to believe in what it is capable of, and who finds it genuinely dificult to explain the drastic economic downturn in these past years through poor governance alone.
India in 2011 was a country that had grown at consistently high rates for two decades, had a young demographic profile, and was positioned as a genuine superpower in the making.
We were leading the IT revolution at a time when the world had just figured out that technology was the new currency of power. An Indian spotted abroad was asked one common question: "Do you work in IT?"
It wasn't a stereotype so much as a signal. The world had noticed. It had clocked which direction we were moving in, and it had started to take us seriously. We weren't just a large country anymore. We were a country with momentum. And momentum, in geopolitics, is the most threatening thing of all.
And then there was the one thing that makes powerful nations genuinely nervous. India is an independent nuclear power. Not a dependent state. Not a country whose arsenal exists because someone else permitted it. Ours. On our terms. Answering to nobody.
A large, young, fast-growing, technologically ambitious, independently nuclear nation with a democratic mandate and a civilisational confidence. That is not a country you want going fully unchecked.
Putting on my tin foil hat, here is the thought I cannot entirely shake: that what has happened to India over the last many years is not simply the consequence of bad governance, corruption, or misfortune. (That of course, is a very real issue laughing in our faces every single day)
That some portion of it has been engineered, or at minimum exploited, by actors with a strategic interest in ensuring that India never becomes what it was projected to become.
There are powers that have done this before. They don't need to invade a country. They just need to find a wound in it and not let it heal - through tools of debt, dependency, tariffs, and narratives shaped by controlled media or manipulated social media algorithms. And then stay out of the way while it consumes itself.
"Just keep the wound open", as they say.
Mismanagement of a population's growth trajectory, and its basic needs which is this consistent and directional, feels almost scripted.
Let me also say - the fractures in Indian society are not new. Religious tension, caste hierarchy, linguistic division: these have existed for centuries. No government manufactured them from scratch.
A country whose population has been allowed to be preoccupied with questions of communal identity, whose minorities are economically anxious and politically marginalised, and whose civil society is increasingly reluctant to speak plainly, is a country whose productive capacity is diminished.
A nation fighting itself cannot look outward with coherence.
They couldn't tame the dragon. So they slowly fed the elephant poisoned food. Enough to keep it from breaking its own shackles. Enough for it to be grateful to be fed. The elephant didn't die. That was never the plan. A dead elephant attracts attention. It is still standing - tall above others, swaying, looking busy, occasionally making noise, hoping to get better, some day.
Someone needed only one new superpower to emerge. Not two. Someone did not want a second China.
And someone got exactly what they needed.