Curator of Curiosities

An eclectic with a passion for writing | Write at: | Finance professional | Interested in the policy domain

[Curator of Curiosities @qrious_curator]

https://t.co/IF47paEE9l

I write on reforms required in the bureaucracy, from an education sector perspective. #reforms #bureaucracy #Indianpolicy #polity #analysis #EducationNews

[Syed Akbaruddin @AkbaruddinIndia]

The Diplomacy of Cooperation Without Conformity

[Aditya Raj Kaul @AdityaRajKaul]

A masterclass in standing up to intimidation.

During the Seoul Defense Dialogue 2026, a Chinese military attaché handed Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro a note reiterating Beijing’s claim that the 2016 South China Sea ruling is “illegal, null and void.”

Teodoro read it aloud and dismantled it point by point.

“No binding force” ~ “Because you don’t want to be subjected to UNCLOS.”

“China does not accept the ruling” ~ “Of course, because you lost.”

Then, in Filipino: “Show a little decency. Have a little shame.”

The room applauded.

Teodoro called China’s move “actual coercion, bullying and aggression” and kept the note as a “memento.”

[Sanatan Prabhat @SanatanPrabhat]

🚨 China Under Fire Over #Nepal Flood

Chinese media reportedly said a sudden flood hit Tibet’s Kerung County around 10:30 AM local time; more than two hours before floodwaters reached Nepal.

Yet, Nepal was reportedly not given an immediate warning.

Residents in Timure had little time to evacuate, with several swept away by the powerful waters.

This is the second consecutive year China has faced accusations of failing to alert Nepal about floods originating in Tibet.

Last year, a glacial lake outburst was identified as the cause. This year, the flood again originated in the Kerung region, though its exact cause remains unclear.

Why was Nepal not warned in time?

तिब्बत सीमा l गंडक नदी l भयानक बाढ़

[Major Madhan Kumar (Retd)🇮🇳 @major_madhan]

God save this states youth 🙏

[Radharamn Das राधारमण दास @RadharamnDas]

I am feeling deeply depressed today. The brutal annihilation of the entire Ganesh Chakraborty family is horrifying & yet, so far, not a single liberal, human-rights activist, or leftist has raised their voice in support of Hindus in Bangladesh.

His daughter was due to be married in just a few days. She was allegedly brutally raped, her eyes were gouged out, and acid was poured on her face. The sheer hatred and brutality directed against Hindus is deeply disturbing.

His wife too was raped and subjected to horrific torture. His 12-year-old son was forcibly circumcised. Ganesh himself was brutally killed.

Their only “crime” was that they were Hindus.

What makes this horror even more disturbing is the alleged treatment of the bodies after the killings—acid was reportedly poured over their faces before the bodies were dumped at the foot of the stairs.

The complete destruction of an entire Hindu family cannot simply be dismissed as an ordinary crime. If these reports are established, this would be a horrifying indictment of law and order, minority protection, and the failure of society to protect innocent human beings from communal violence.

Where are the voices that so loudly speak about human rights when the victims are Hindu?

Human rights cannot be selective. Outrage cannot depend on the religion of the victim. If you remain silent when an entire family is allegedly brutalised and killed because they are Hindu, that silence is not neutrality—it is hypocrisy.

#Bangladesh #Dhaka #Chittagong #Uttara #Dhanmondi #HumanRights #HinduLivesMatter #SaveBangladeshiHindus

[Swati Goel Sharma @swati_gs]

1. What's wrong with the Giva ad?

Nothing you see on TV/advertisement or/big screen, especially in big budget projects, is innocent or accidental

The Giva ad continues a broader trend in how film-entertainment and ad industries have treated cultural sensitivities of the two majority communities very differently for years - something Gems of Bollywood has exposed so clearly

Look at the way popular culture has marketed Hindu festivals for years. For instance, check any compilation for suggestions for Diwali playlist:
“Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai”
“Let’s Nacho”
“Tamma Tamma Again”

But typical suggestions for Eid playlist:
“Noor-e-Khuda”
“Maula Ali”
“Kun Faya Kun”

Typical media suggestions for Diwali outfit ideas these days: sexualised styling - cleavage, revealing blouses, familiar Bollywood glamour

Typical outfit suggestions for Eid: Rich and covered

This means that they know what cultural sensitivity looks like, what a family gathering looks like, what sanctity of a festival looks like

But they apply it only where they want

The test of their intention is simple. Look at the image attached. Imagine her holding a plate for Iftari and the text saying Eid. Will any brand ever run such an ad?

2. Are these ads really made to increase sales during Rakhi?

The primary purpose of such an advertisement is not to sell jewellery for Rakhi. Conduct a market survey. Show consumers the ad and ask them whether the imagery is prompting them to buy Giva jewellery on Rakhi for their sisters. I doubt the answer would be overwhelmingly yes

Modern advertising works at a deeper level than simply saying buy this product. It is often aimed at shaping long-term attitudes

When the same kind of imagery is repeatedly used around certain festivals, weddings and family occasions, it leads to normalisation of a particular culture

Much of it seems to be aimed at creating a society where every aspect of a woman's life is sexualised. I would say it is the same mindset that wants to legalise adult men having sex with schoolgirls

3. How should the public respond?

Stop treating these celebrities as icons and withdraw your interest from them

The same actress as in the ad did Thumkeshwari item number and then pretended to be Ma Sita on screen - until we vehemently opposed it, ran a campaign, people responded and the movie bombed

Reject them from every aspect of your life where you have a choice

[Income Tax India @IncomeTaxIndia]

The Income Tax Department has launched a nationwide verification exercise into suspicious foreign remittances. The exercise follows data analysis and ground intelligence indicating significant overseas remittances by entities with little or no reported business activity.

The Department has emphasised the importance of exercising due diligence and sound judgment by professionals while issuing cerfiticates in Form 15CB/Form 146.

Details in the Press Release:

[Nitin Pai @acorn]

This was written around 2000 years ago. Things haven't changed much.
===
Milinda: “Revered Nagasena, will you converse with me?”

Nagasena: “I will converse if you, sire, will converse in the speech of the learned, but if you converse, in the speech of kings I will not converse.”

M: “How, Revered Nagasena do the learned converse?”

N: “When the learned are conversing, sire, there is a turning over and an unravelling of the subject; then there is a refutation and an acknowledgement of a mistake; distinctions and contradistinctions are drawn; yet, thereby, they are not angered. It is thus, sire, that the learned converse.”

M: “And how, revered sir, do kings converse?”

N: “When kings are conversing, sire, they approve of some matter and order punishment for anyone who disagrees with that matter, saying: ‘Inflict a punishment on him.’ It is thus, sire, that kings converse.”

(The Milindapanna, ed. NKG Mendis)

[Sann @san_x_m]

In the 1971 war, India lost a warship at sea. Its sonar had not been able to find the submarine that sank it.

India then tried to buy better sonar. The countries that made it would not sell.

So the Navy told one of its own officers to build it himself.

His name is Arogyaswami Paulraj.

He was born in Pollachi, a small town in Tamil Nadu. He joined the Indian Navy as a teenager and stayed for about 30 years.

The Navy spotted him early and sent him to the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi for a master's degree. His professors told the Navy not to stop there. He finished a doctorate.

After the 1971 war he was given the sonar problem.

He had no foreign help, no foreign equipment and no permission to buy either. His team built the system from the ground up. It was called APSOH. It went into the fleet in 1983.

It was not a compromise. It is still considered one of the best sonars in the world.

He went on to set up 3 national research laboratories in India, in computing, artificial intelligence and military electronics. India gave him the Padma Bhushan.

Then he left the Navy and joined Stanford University in America as a postdoctoral researcher, starting again at the bottom.

While running wireless experiments there, he noticed something odd in his results about how signals could be separated from one another. He followed it.

What came out of it is called MIMO. In simple terms, instead of one antenna sending and one antenna receiving, you use several at both ends at once, and the signals stop fighting each other and start carrying far more data.

That is the foundation of every WiFi connection and every 4G and 5G phone on the planet.

The chairman of the Marconi Society put it plainly. Every WiFi router and 4G phone today uses MIMO technology pioneered by him.

He founded a company on it, which Intel bought. He founded another, which Broadcom bought. He holds around 80 patents.

He has the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Faraday Medal, and a place in the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The internet in your house is running on his idea right now, and almost nobody in this country knows his name.

[Swarajya @SwarajyaMag]

A 400-page evangelical handbook sold in Tamil Nadu says Murugan is Jesus.

St Thomas brought him, the Tamils Indianised him, and the rest follows from there.

- Devasena stands for Jewish Christians.
- Valli stands for Gentiles waiting to be converted.
- His twelve hands are the twelve apostles.
- The kavadi is a forgotten reenactment of Christ carrying the cross

John Samuel, then director of the Institute of Asian Studies, convened the first international conference on Skanda-Murugan in Chennai in 1998. He told scholars there that most researchers, himself included, believe Murugan was elevated from a historical person.

In 2005, he went further and wrote that the Somaskanda icon, which shows Siva, Uma and the child Skanda together, is nothing but the revelation of the 'Christian Trinity'.

And for all of this to work, one thing has to be true first. Murugan has to have started as a Tamil folk god or a dead chieftain, separate from Skanda, who was bolted on later by northerners.

That is also the settled position in Tamil academia, and has been for fifty years.

BUT here is the trouble with it.

The six stars of the Pleiades are the Krittikas. They nurse the infant Skanda, which is why he has six faces and the name Karttikeya, son of the Krittikas.

In Dravidian languages, 'min' means star and fish. So "six fish" on a Harappan seal also means "six stars".

A Soviet Dravidian specialist read one four-sign group as aru-min-kaatalan, beloved son of the six stars. That is what Karttikeya means in Sanskrit. The seal reading is arguable. The Tamil epithet is not — it runs through Tamil literature for centuries.

At Kalibangan, diggers found seven brick fireplaces on a ceremonial platform. Six in a row, one apart. That is exactly how Vedic ritual arranges the fires of seven priests.

The Rigveda has the story before it has the name. A fire the gods did not light, found hidden in the waters, nursed by seven river-mothers who crowd around him like mares around a foal.

The Mahabharata names him. The Krittikas see the blazing child, milk rises in them, each says 'esa mama putrah' (he is my son), and he takes six faces so all six can feed him.

The Sangam-era Thirumurukattrupadai already gives Murugan six faces, the Pleiades and Agni. It describes Brahmins doing his puja and calls them men of clans of yore, so not new arrivals 1,700 years ago. The same literature records the shamanic priestess sacrificing roosters to him.

Nobody was separating anything.

The full piece has the Harappan buffalo-slaying seal, the kavadi on seals from 3250 BCE, the Rigveda hymn about a fire the gods did not light, John Samuel of the Institute of Asian Studies calling the Somaskanda icon a revelation of the Trinity, and the temple the 2004 tsunami uncovered.

Aravindan Neelakandan (@arvindneela) writes — The Long, Insidious Campaign To Separate Skanda From Murugan

https://t.co/X485VuWu3M

[Curator of Curiosities @qrious_curator]

https://t.co/IjoqSOU1cg

I write on how we Indians have learnt live with civic apathy amongst us and what can be a good approach to reducing and eventually ending it

Do lmk what u think about it!

#indiansociety #indianvalues #Indians #civicsense #civicdiscipline #change4better

[Hindustan Times @htTweets]

If India wants to achieve the 2047 dream of a developed country, a total overhaul of Indian bureaucracy is required, as the corrupt must be thrown out and merit must be rewarded, writes 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗿 𝗚𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗮 ✍🏻

Read full story: https://t.co/36KSmhDVcI

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years.

The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and botulism in the carcasses they eat. A flock strips a cow to bone in about 45 minutes.

India had 50 million of them. Free sanitation at national scale, in a country where religious custom means most cattle die natural deaths and every dead cow becomes a carcass someone has to deal with.

Then the patent on diclofenac expired in 1994. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. Trace amounts left in a carcass cause kidney failure in vultures. Within a decade, 50 million birds fell to a few thousand. The fastest collapse of any bird species since the passenger pigeon.

The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs took the vultures' place and brought rabies with them. Rotting remains leached into waterways. In districts where vultures once thrived, human death rates rose more than 4 percent. Economists at Chicago and Warwick put the toll at 100,000 extra deaths a year and $69 billion in annual damages.

So yes, the goofy bird sprinting down the walkway is adorable. It's also a disease firewall that evolution spent millions of years building and one generic painkiller nearly erased in ten.

[Sanjeev Sanyal @sanjeevsanyal]

Apparently, a uniform set of laws for all citizens is good for Britain but somehow not for India. A very interesting view from @TheEconomist

[Gaurrav bhrdwj @gaurravbhrdwj]

On 9 August, a truck driver had a tiger sighting on the road at night while passing through the forest in Dantewada. Although this incident may seem common, no evidence of tiger presence has been found in this iron-mining area over the past 3–4 years. The said tiger was seen by a truck driver who also made a video of it.
This area is one of the closest to the Indravati Tiger Reserve in the Bastar division. However, in terms of direct corridor connectivity, it is situated extremely close to the wildlife corridors of Tadoba and other Maharashtra landscapes, linked through the lower areas of Gadchiroli and Chandrapur. I can state with certainty that this tiger is not one of the 5–6 resident tigers of Indravati, but a new tiger that has come from Maharashtra through the corridor. Interestingly, just a few days ago, poachers were caught in the same area with a tiger skin.
Currently, the Forest Department is increasing its patrols for the tiger’s safety and has installed trap cameras in some areas located near the Dankini river. So far, no evidence of the tiger’s presence has appeared in the trap cameras, nor has the tiger hunted any cattle in this area. This pattern strongly indicates that the tiger is continuously moving through the corridor and is searching for a safe habitat for itself.
For the protection of this tiger, the Chhattisgarh Forest Department must remain vigilant and simultaneously strengthen its intelligence (mukhbiri) network so that the safety of this tiger can be ensured. Otherwise, if we look at past experiences, all the axis tigers from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh that came into Chhattisgarh through corridors have either been killed (their skins recovered at different times) or have simply disappeared.
Taking these experiences as a serious threat, extreme caution is absolutely necessary; otherwise, Chhattisgarh’s record so far will continue to be called a graveyard for tigers. #DantewadaTiger #BastarTiger
#IndravatiTigerReserve #TigerCorridor #ChhattisgarhWildlife
#SaveTheTiger #TigerConservation

[Curator of Curiosities @qrious_curator]

This is what happens when we handle external and internal policies well.

FCRA is also such a step. Foreign funding was spoiling their lives while making them believe the opposite. Mainstreaming is the best thing that could happen to them! 🫰

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Raipur, Chhattisgarh: Former women Naxals, who once carried weapons in the dense forests of Bastar, walked the ramp to huge applause at a National Handloom Day event in Raipur after joining the mainstream. (07.08)

[chacha monk @oldschoolmonk]

India is much bigger than what you see at Jantar Mantar.

[Alvin @Alvin1492840]

A guy bought a $1,800 Samsung TV and watched it for 3 years.

Netflix. YouTube. Sports. Movies. Every night. Same screen. Same picture. He thought it looked fine. He assumed that's just what a TV looks like.

His friend, a home theater installer who calibrates 200+ TVs a year across luxury homes came over to watch a fight one Saturday night. He sat on the couch, looked at the screen for about 5 seconds, and said:

"You're in Vivid mode."
"What's Vivid mode?"
"It's the picture setting Samsung puts on every TV so it pops under the fluorescent lights at Best Buy. Maximum brightness. Oversaturated colors. Artificial sharpness cranked to 50. It's designed to catch your eye on a showroom wall next to 60 other TVs not for watching content in a living room. You've been watching a Best Buy demo reel on your couch for 3 years."

He picked up the remote and started going through Settings.

"Your skin tones are orange. Your motion smoothing is making every movie look like a soap opera. The eco mode is dimming your brightness by 40% during dark scenes. The sharpness filter is adding digital noise to every frame. Your HDMI ports are blocking HDR from your streaming stick. Your TV is taking screenshots of your screen and selling your viewing data. And Bixby has been listening through the remote's microphone since the day you plugged this in."

He changed 9 settings in 11 minutes.

The guy looked at the screen and said "did you buy me a new TV while I wasn't looking?"

His friend said: "Same TV. Same panel. Same $1,800 you spent 3 years ago. Samsung builds incredible displays and then ships them with settings designed for a retail store, not your living room. Nobody tells you to change them because Samsung makes money from the defaults you leave untouched."

Here's every setting he changed 🧵

[Dr. AK 🇮🇳 @docakx]

Practice the plan.

Role-play in stores, parks and malls.

Point out real uniformed staff and parents with kids.

Rehearse the exact words: “I’m lost. Can you help me find my mom? Her name is ___ and her number is ___.”

Five minutes of practice beats hours of panic.