Mrinal Shrivastav

Quintessential infatuation with literature, petrichor, and museums.
न भीतो मरणादस्मि, केवलं दूषितं यशः।

[Mrinal Shrivastav @mrinal_shri]

Remembering Munshi Premchand ji, through his lines on his Birth Anniversary.
कथा सम्राट, कलम के मजदूर मुंशी प्रेमचंद जी
#premchand #MunsiPremchand
#प्रेमचंद #Hindi #Poet #Hindwi

[Cricinfo @cricinfo]

"We're just custodians of those runs for the team"

[Padmaja Joshi @PadmajaJoshi]

Word of the Day: Abuse

A comic has been booked in multiple states, summoned by NCW and a man lost his job because of a crass/abusive/offensive joke.

Politicians get to be abusive without consequence?

Outrage: selective and gone too far.

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

Deeply shocking to read this official US statement, which contains absolutely no expression of regret or condolence for the loss of innocent Indian lives. How can a “friend” and strategic partner be so deeply insensitive?

Why couldn’t a non-compliant commercial vessel have been stopped using other, non-lethal means? Is it not possible to disable a ship's propulsion or steering without firing missiles targeted to kill civilian crew members?

Practically every merchant ship navigating these crucial waters has Indian crew on board. Are they all considered fair game for US missiles now?

This approach is unacceptable and I hope @DrSJaishankar had said so to @marcorubio.

[NORTHERN COMMAND - INDIAN ARMY @NorthernComd_IA]

Lt Gen Pratik Sharma, #ArmyCdrNC, visited general area #GambhirMughlan for an operational review and situational assessment of #OperationSheruwali.

The Army Commander interacted with representatives of local #IndianArmy formations, #JKP, #IB, #CRPF and other stakeholders to review the evolving operational dynamics and strengthen inter-agency #synergy. He also engaged with troops deployed in the area and commended their relentless resolve, high morale and steadfast commitment while operating in a demanding environment.

Emphasising mission focus and operational excellence, the Army Commander exhorted all teams to pursue the objective with professional acumen, precision and a shared sense of purpose.

#NationFirst
#AlwaysInCombat

@adgpi
@Whiteknight_IA
@JmuKmrPolice
@crpfindia

[Sachin Tendulkar @sachin_rt]

From the time I started playing cricket, Kane Williamson has been one of the most technically compact and magnificent batters I have seen. Balance, timing, and that trademark calm at the crease came together to make his batting one of the most consistently pleasing sights in world cricket. A thorough gentleman and a true role model for youngsters.

His retirement will probably be received with unexpected relief in more than a few bowling camps. Wishing him luck and success in his next chapter.

[Roland-Garros @rolandgarros]

Forever on our Wall of Champions ✍️

#RolandGarros

[Mrinal Shrivastav @mrinal_shri]

Sascha #Zverev deserves the very same panegyrics written for the greats of the tennis World. He has been living with Type 1 Diabetes since the age of three. And here, against all odds, we have the Champion! #RolandGarros

[Roland-Garros @rolandgarros]

The moment Zverev became a Roland-Garros champion!

#RolandGarros

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Mumbai, Maharashtra: "Society has sexualized a dignified profession like nursing, which harms the dignity of the profession", says Actress and BJP MP Kangana Ranaut

[Nikhil Naz @NikhilNaz]

Indian cricket may have moved on from Surya Kumar Yadav. But his contribution as a T20 player and skipper cannot be overstated.

As skipper not only did he defend the T20 crown but also pulled off an incredible feat of not losing a single bilateral T20I series. Under him Indian batting broke the shackles and transformed into the most destructive T20 team in the world. The kinds that was the envy of the world. All down to SKY backing his players to the hilt—poor form notwithstanding—and allowing them the freedom to express themselves.

As a player, his recent returns may have been meagre but he was for a 2/3 year period the best T20 batter on the plant. Audacious, innovative and attractive!

[Sanket Upadhyay @sanket]

यह बात दो कौड़ी की नहीं, १६ आने सच है।TV पत्रकारों की बीमारी ऑनलाइन अध्यापकों को लग गई – लोकप्रियता रोग।पत्रकारों ने गांडीव छोड़ा तो अध्यापक वही काम कर रहे। सही बात अलोकप्रिय भी होती है। इस रिस्क के साथ चलना होगा की वायरल नहीं होंगे।
तमाशा पत्रकारिता का विकल्प तमाशा शिक्षा नहीं।

[Rāma Śēṣan Chandraśēkaran @maa_bhaishiiH]

Except that one cousin has been cursing his grandparent, has been larping as the foreign people who looted and raped his parents, partitioned the grandparental estate to carve a space for his own to live under the auspices of those foreigners’ ideologies, and now suddenly wants to claim the properties that the grandparents left, given that they are now valuable

[Savitri Mumukshu - सावित्री मुमुक्षु @MumukshuSavitri]

Audrey Truschke who claims to be such a knowledgeable expert on Indian history that she claims to correct even the Ministry of Culture - does not even know the number to number comparison of IVC sites & smugly proclaims that the “big cities were definitely in Pakistan”

What kind of expert does not even know that more than 65% of all IVC sites are situated in post Partition India?

The approximate numbers are:
India: ~925 sites
Pakistan: ~475 sites
Afghanistan: 1-4 sites

More importantly it is India’s Haryana which has both the largest site (Rakhigarhi) & the oldest site (Bhirrana, 8000-7570 BCE).

Rakhigarhi is by far the biggest IVC site that has been excavated covering an area of 350 hectares which is a far bigger city than Mohenjo-daro (300 hectares). Rakhigarhi was a manufacturing hub - archaeologists excavated 9+ massive mounds which made up the core residential areas & massive industrial zones filled with circular brick furnaces where gold, copper, and carnelian were mass produced and used to make jewelry.

Moreover Rakhigarhi shows continuous habitation through all 3 major periods of Early, Mature, and Late Harappan phases (5500 BCE to 1900 BCE)

Even though Rakhigarhi is recognized as the largest IVC site (~350 hectares), more than half of it still remains buried! It has not been fully excavated yet because two heavily populated villages of Rakhi-Khas and Rakhi-Shahpur are sitting directly on top of the ancient city mounds. GPR surveys have shown that if the remaining area is excavated then Rakhigarhi's true size would officially expand to a whopping 550+ hectares, making it almost double the size of Mohenjo-daro.

So how can an authoritative academic scholar make such a false and ridiculous claim that Pakistan has the biggest IVC cities?

Yet another very promising and under-excavated site in India is at Lakmirwala, Punjab where prelim surveys and trial trenches show the city spanned an estimated 225 hectares. Once it is fully excavated, Lakmirwala would definitely surpass Harappa (~150 hectares) and Dholavira (~120 hectares) to become the second-largest IVC site in India and the fourth-largest overall.

It’s the same story with Dhalewan (Punjab) which is estimated to span ~150 hectares - as big as Harappa. So far only minor parts of the mound have been surveyed, so potentially there is a massive, structurally complex city sitting unexcavated below the earth. Not to mention there are just as many promising sites awaiting excavation in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

One would expect the self-proclaimed Grand Poobah of “South Asian History” to know this much at least.

So much for the great IVC expert - Miss Fraudery.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

This is Audrey's pinned tweet. It is hilariously ironic that Audrey quotes Nilakantha Dikshita’s Kalividambanam (Verse 1). She clearly missed the joke.

Nilakantha was satirizing fake scholars who do not know their subjects.
When he wrote 'Na boddhavyam, na sravyam... jhatiti prativaktavyam,' he was mocking charlatans who refuse to understand the subject, refuse to listen to opposing evidence & just scream immediate replies to look smart.

​If she had actually read the very next verse in Nilakantha’s text (Verse 2), she would have realized she was walking into a trap. Nilakantha goes on to list the 5 ways these fake scholars try to win an argument when they lack substance:

असंभ्रमो विलज्जत्वम् अवज्ञा प्रतिवादिनि l
हासो राज्ञः स्तवश्चेति पञ्चैते जयहेतवः ll

Remaining unbothered, sheer shamelessness, showing utter contempt for the opponent, mocking them & praising the ruling powers (the King)... these 5 are their keys to victory.

This is the exact operational playbook of modern ideological historians when cornered by hard evidence.

Let me further quote the verse 3 also to get the full context:

अश‍िक्ष‍ितेषु वक्तव्यं सभ्येषु महता कलिना l
श‍िक्ष‍ितेषु तु वक्तव्यं मध्यस्थोऽयं विमत्सरः ll

If the judge is uneducated, just shout loudly to win. If the judge is smart, immediately accuse him of being biased!

Whenever an Indian scholar/community group exposes a factual error in her work using hard data, the response is rarely a factual counter-argument. Instead, she immediately claims she is being harassed/attacked by nationalists.

She & others use institutional victimhood as a shield to completely avoid answering legitimate, evidence-based academic critiques.

[Disha Ahluwalia @ahluwaliadisha]

Not going to comment on Dr. Truschke's tweet just yet.
But I would like to clarify. She is not an archaeologist. She has never worked on Harappan Civilization and has never published any paper.
In her og tweet she referred to her book, which includes only few lines on the seal

[Amish Tripathi @authoramish]

Proto-Elamite?

The Pashupati seal has an elephant, a water buffalo and a rhinoceros. Ancient Elam was centred in southwestern Iran. Elephants, water buffalos and rhinoceroses are not native to ancient Elam. BTW, they are native to India. Also, the figure is seated in a Yogic posture. Is Yoga also Elamite now? Seriously?

Your profile says you are a professor. I don't mean to sound rude, but your students deserve a refund. And seriously, Western universities need to improve their hiring practices.

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

Now that the whole eggoz scaremongering that everyone (particularly mainstream media) indulged in seems to have vanished without a trace (and moved on to newer, more disgust-pandering topics like pus in milk), it’s worth asking - can we step back a bit and consider what happened here?

[Nityānanda Miśra (मिश्रोपाख्यो नित्यानन्दः) @MisraNityanand]

Romila Thapar’s false claim for 30+ years

For more than thirty years, eminent historian Romila Thapar has claimed that Patañjali compared the relationship or conflict between the Brahmanas and the Shramanas to that between the snake and the mongoose.

The claim is completely false. Watch to know more.

[Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj @DeepikaBhardwaj]

I have never called myself saviour of men but if internet has started calling me so, it is because of the sheer volume of work I have done in past one and a half decade single handedly while you as an entire organization can only bitch and slander being jealous, incompetent and radical

I am not blind to the suffering of women like you. Speaking up for men for me doesn't mean demeaning women like your organization does and its leader teaches to everyone who becomes a part

Your leader didn't spare even his mother from calling her the most dirty names and all the old folks in the movement know that. Your followers call all women names just like the mother of this son who choked a woman and drove her to suicide

While I speak up for men I will always call out men like you who spread hate for all women, continue to take stand for dignity of a woman in cases like these and maintain my humanity not sacrificing it for any narrative or ideology

There's a reason why you have to sell packages and yell at people to donate for your organization while I have trust, support and backing of countless because of which we sustain ourselves and grow effortlessly

Continue barking .....

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Asha Bhosle was cast out by her own family at 16. She’d eloped with her elder sister Lata Mangeshkar’s secretary, a man twice her age. The marriage turned abusive. She walked out with two children and a third on the way, returning to a family that barely wanted her back.

To survive, she took every recording job the top singers rejected. In Indian cinema, actors don’t sing their own songs. Singers record in a studio, and the actors lip-sync on camera. In the 1950s, the big films went to established voices. Bhosle got the leftovers: B-grade soundtracks, cabaret numbers, songs for the villain’s girlfriend. Between 1948 and 1957, she recorded more songs than any other singer in the country, but almost none of them mattered.

Her break came from composer O.P. Nayyar, who gave her the lead songs in Naya Daur (1957). For the first time, she was the voice of the heroine. By the mid-1960s, she’d partnered with a young composer named R.D. Burman. Their first major collaboration nearly didn’t happen. When Bhosle heard the westernized dance number “Aaja Aaja” for Teesri Manzil (1966), she told Burman she couldn’t sing it. He offered to rewrite the music. She refused, rehearsed for ten days, and delivered one of the decade’s biggest hits. That professional partnership became a marriage in 1980. Burman died in 1994.

In 1981, composer Khayyam asked her to sing two notes lower than usual for the film Umrao Jaan. The ghazals (traditional Urdu love songs) she recorded won her India’s National Film Award and shattered the idea that she could only do pop. At 62, she recorded the Rangeela soundtrack with A.R. Rahman. At 79, she made her debut as a film actress.

Guinness World Records certified her in 2011 as the most recorded artist in music history. She put out over 11,000 songs in more than 20 languages across eight decades, and no other recording artist on Earth has come close.

Her voice crossed borders in ways almost no Indian artist had before. Cornershop wrote “Brimful of Asha” about her in 1997, and a Fatboy Slim remix sent it to No. 1 in the UK. The Black Eyed Peas sampled her vocals. The Kronos Quartet, a classical string ensemble, recorded an album of R.D. Burman compositions with her and earned a Grammy nomination. Earlier this year, at 92, she appeared on a Gorillaz track.

She outlived the people closest to her. Her daughter Varsha died in 2012 at 56. Her son Hemant died of cancer in 2015. Her sister Lata, the most famous singer in Indian history, died in 2022, also at 92. After Varsha’s death, Bhosle told reporters the pain would stay with her until her last breath, but added: “You should always laugh with others but cry alone.”

Asha Bhosle died today in Mumbai at 92. She recorded her first song at 10, her last collaboration at 92, and spent the 82 years in between proving that the woman they once threw out could outlast every voice that came before or after her.

[बिहार | Bihar @Biharyouth1]

ये कौन बकलोल भारतीय मार्केट में थाई अमरूद लेकर आया? कोई करम का स्वाद नहीं इसमें, पनसोर लगता है, बस पाव भर-आधा कीलो की बॉडी बनाकर आ गया है। अमरूदों की दुनिया का ब्रायलर मुर्गा है ये।
इससे कहीं स्वादिष्ट और पौष्टिक भारतीय अमरूद हैं। लेकिन मार्केट में यही मोटका बिकते रहता है। 😤