Amit Mishra

Living the dream "YoScholar".
दोस्तों ! अब मंच पर सुविधा नहीं है,
आजकल नेपथ्य में संभावना है

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Sidhant Sibal @sidhant]

Outgoing Air Force Chief AP Singh's final fighter sortie.

Vdo csty: IAF

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Gorgeous photo! 🥲 That’s Air Chief Marshal AP Singh in the Tejas out front, his final fighter sortie before he retires month end. Trailed by (L-R) a MiG-29, Jaguar, Su-30, Mirage 2000 & Rafale.

[Hetal @heyytal]

what I absolutely detest about the protests is that they end up making the worst kind of people & absolute nothings so popular

[Kamlesh Singh / Tau @kkstau]

More than 70% of Indians have never seen an SIR in motion before this one. So, naturally, what is supposed to be a routine exercise looks suspicious, unusual, and unnecessary. Abhi tak to nahin hota tha.

Exactly why it should happen regularly. A routine skipped for so long will arouse suspicion.

The same may happen with the Census, because the plan is to collect more data, and many will wonder whether it's counting or another conspiracy.

[Gunja @GeeKayTalks]

CJI has a Court - those who want to engage with him must go to his court. Simple.
SC is not Starbucks.

[mayurwrites @freentglty]

The Brown Sepoy's sense of outrage knows no bounds when gora malik is questioned.

[Harpreet @CestMoiz]

INS Ganga vs puny sail boat .. the sheer difference in size!

[Mohandas Pai @TVMohandasPai]

Ran a Fake Hit Job on Dharmasthala amongst others. Total disgrace. A true yellow journalism please apologise

[J Gopikrishnan @jgopikrishnan70]

Frankly.... what Supreme Court can do on street protests ... will protestors adhere or Govt can adhere on Orders? ...anyway Supreme Court can say (urge) to do protests peacefully & order Govt to adhere to orders ...

Even some Advocates' Unions (yesterday second Saturday, many Left Advocates Unions were also part of the protest .. It is their right to do so ...But don't misuse rights as Officers of Court in street protests) ... What kind of orders can be passed on street protests

Solution is - SC must order Election Commission to settle the SIR issues in practical ways ... Order Election Commission to give voting right to all who produce documents and not cut anyone - if doubt go and check on spot 😎

[Livefist @livefist]

Hi @ShivAroor, that’s a K-9 Vajra in your podcast about the Zorawar tank. 💀🥲

[H/T: @alpha_defense]

Good episode though! https://t.co/2i7JQeNi2Z

[औरंगज़ेब 2.0 🇮🇳 @__phoenix_fire_]

Who has given her rights to use her husband’s uniform as a prop?

No guidelines for the families @adgpi ? Hope someone takes notice of this

[Bhavesh Kansara @kansaratva]

When you sell your blood clots for biryani.

[Subash R @subashr232]

I was fascinated by the idea of migrating abroad when I was in middle school. I had heard so many “wow” stories about the sons and daughters of my father’s colleagues who had gone overseas.

I wrote the SAT way back in 2003. Got multiple admits, including NUS and NTU. Everything was ready for me to migrate.

But I also got admission to CEG, then among the best engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu. And I did the unthinkable. I chose Mechanical Engineering at CEG over NUS/NTU.

Dad went wild!

At the end of my undergraduate years, I had two choices: GRE or CAT. Dad wanted me to take the GRE and leave India at the earliest. I chose CAT. I stayed back.

I eventually started a venture in one of India's most heavily regulated industries.

And the regulators nearly killed my venture thrice. Closing down MSE. Slashing commissions at their whims and fancies. Arbitrarily increasing net-worth requirements and questioning the very viability of my business.

There were moments when I wondered whether staying back had been a mistake. The system certainly gave me enough reasons to feel that way.

Yet, by God's grace, I survived. Seventeen years of running a company in India.

And despite everything, I still love this country. I don't entirely know why.

Perhaps it is the mananimmathi I experience when I travel through her countryside. Perhaps it is the atma tripti her temples give me. Perhaps it is the inexplicable happiness I feel in Malnad, in my Pandya desam, or in my beloved Travancore whenever I set foot on that soil and walk its paths.

Priceless. Absolutely priceless.

Look at where India was in the 1960s and 1970s and where she is today. She has come a long way.

From confiscatory 97% marginal income-tax rates to a much lower peak rate today. From a hopelessly Fabian socialist model to a mixed economy. From waiting endlessly for a Bajaj Chetak to being able to buy a Toyota in minutes. From waiting years for a telephone connection to becoming one of the world's cheapest mobile-data markets. From mud roads to expressways. From extreme poverty — remember Kamal Haasan eating an apple that had fallen into a gutter in Varumayin Niram Sivappu — to Shimla apples being available even in village markets.

India has travelled an extraordinary distance.

Of course, she could have done much better. She could have become another Singapore in terms of civic infrastructure, public services and urban planning. We have squandered decades and opportunities. There is no denying that.

But she remains India.

I take comfort in how far she has travelled despite decades of socialist policies and political mismanagement, rather than spending every waking moment complaining about everything that is wrong with her.

I can criticise India. I can demand better governance, better infrastructure and better public services. I can be frustrated with her bureaucracy and regulations.

But my affection for her runs deeper than my frustrations.

And perhaps that is what people who constantly compare India with the West fail to understand. A country is not merely the quality of its roads, the efficiency of its bureaucracy or the size of its paycheques. There is also a sense of belonging, a civilisational connection and a peace of mind that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet.

I would rather be a small soul in a country I love than spend my life as an indentured servant in a soulless system.

I had my opportunities to leave. I chose to stay.

Seventeen years later, with all the scars, setbacks and struggles, I still feel it was worth it.

She is far from perfect. But she is mine. She will never ditch me. She will not ask for a VISA to accommodate me as she has soul and I am her son.

And that makes all the difference.

[Parveen Kaswan, IFS @ParveenKaswan]

This is how heroes look like in real life.

See how Akash Kerketta, a forest staff of Kurseong division averted a major accident. Sikkim Mahananda train was coming on Bagdogra-Naxalbari Route.
Due to timely intervention of forest staff and train pilots elephant herd was saved.

[Smita Prakash @smitaprakash]

Navratri greetings to one and all. May the goddess bless everyone with strength to overcome obstacles, wisdom to separate right from wrong, compassion and joy.

[יצחק הרצוג Isaac Herzog @Isaac_Herzog]

Captain Smit Machchhar, you are a hero of Israel, India, and all of humanity!

In my letter to you which you received over the weekend, I shared our prayers for your full and speedy recovery.

As I wrote in my letter, I look forward to welcoming you to Jerusalem once you regain your strength. On behalf of the people of Israel, I would be honored to present you with Israel’s highest recognition of civilian heroism, the Israeli Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism.

[Amul.coop @Amul_Coop]

We are pleased to congratulate Mr. Sarvesh Kushare on winning the Silver Medal in the Men’s High Jump event at the Asian Games 2026.

Our team presented an Amul products gift hamper to him as a token of appreciation for this remarkable achievement.

[Cristopher Moltisanti @moltisantiiiiii]

sir aapne Suits pe dekh ke law ki padhai ki hai kya?