Icarus

Law, Art, and Philosophy.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

Accused in Delhi gangrape are in the age bracket of 25-30. When nirbhaya happened they must be 10-15. Abhorrent that having witnessed it as a child didnt spark in them a disgust for crime and rather breeded the rashness.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

Benjamin Labatut - "atoms that destroyed Hiroshima & Nagasaki were not split by generals but physicists". STEM can give speed and tech - humanities informs its direction. Humanities need not scrapped but its direction and priorities need overhaul for decades now.#IITBombayProtest

[Priyank 乔汉 (∆/∆) @priyankchn]

From my experience in JNU, let me show how 'critical thinking' works in Indian humanities:

1. Mediocre teacher who has never had an original thought in their life introduces the importance of 'critical thinking'
2. They immediately proceed to give an approved list of 'critical thoughts' everyone should think
3. Thoughts outside this list are deemed annoying and not critical by the mediocre teacher
4. Classes hijacked by NPCs who mug up the list and start doing critical thinking by the kilos

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

@abhas_rewcie The normative frameworks informing the student outroar have been gradually laid down by humanities over the years post independence.

[Pravesh Biyani @pravesh]

did my https://t.co/zANOEvvHvH at IIT Bombay and my PhD at IIT Delhi. I've been a professor for 14 years now. In 22 years of watching the IIT/IIIT system closely, I have never once witnessed a teacher discriminate against a student on the basis of caste.

During my https://t.co/zANOEvvHvH, most of us had no idea what caste our batchmates belonged to. Many of my close friends were SC/ST. We never discussed it. It never entered any conversation or decision. Not once. Our exposure to the humanities department was limited, though — the term "Brahmanical patriarchy" didn't even exist back then.

As a teacher, I don't ask a student's name before solving their doubt. Often I don't know their name at all — some of my classes have 300+ students. We treat them all the same. So does every colleague I know. So did every professor who taught me.

Social media has now filled vulnerable students' heads with a lot of manufactured grievance about caste discrimination that, in my experience, doesn't exist.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

@Shukla_Shubh7 No substitute for sanskaar, sir.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

@jain_harshit Harshit, voting is a civic right. UPI is a payment system involving operational cost for service providers. Unless you’d demand free airfare against your right to free movement, paying for services shouldn’t seem an anomaly or excess. So limited in scope and magnitude over that.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

Hues and cries about MDR on UPI miss out the whole point; UPI isn’t successful because it’s free, but because it’s seamless, secure, flexible, QR integrated, and unified. MDR affects none of that - Digital India ain’t going anywhere. Not to mention MDR’s limited scope.

[Dr Poornima 🇮🇳 @PoornimaNimo]

New UPI rules explained.

If you send money to another person.
You pay ₹0.
For example:
You send ₹500 to your friend : No charge
You send ₹10,000 to your mother: No charge
You send ₹1 lakh to someone: No charge

If you pay a shop or a business
The customer still pays ₹0.
The charge, called MDR, Merchant Discount Rate is charged to the merchant, not you.

For example, suppose you buy a ₹10,000 television and pay through UPI.
You pay: ₹10,000
Merchant receives: ₹9,960 if the 0.4% MDR applies
₹40 is the MDR.
So you don't see an extra ₹40 deducted from your bank account.

If the transaction to the Merchant 8s below ₹2000. He gets the full ₹2000 amt. No MDR is charged to the merchant.

For small businesses, small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh per month through QR code payments remain at zero MDR.
So hawkers, roadside vendors are not charged MDR.

[tejas @persuingdreams]

Bhojpuri, Avadhi, Magahi and Maithili were the first victim of Hindi imposition. You can't runaway from this fact.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

On the nature of Indian constitution; I have come to see it as "transfusional" that does not adopt any model per se but transfuses specific elements to further the cause of 'pragmatic' constitutionalism based in socio-ethical objectives.
BSD protects objects more than a model.

[Garima𝕏 @Garima]

She became a mother. She grew a human, wrecked her body, paused her career, and walked into a room looking like an actual adult woman instead of a filtered 22-year-old. Your first instinct was “she is finished.” That single sentence explains why many women looked at men like you and quietly decided motherhood isn’t worth the humiliation that follows. You didn’t just insult her. You advertised how little value you assign to women the moment they stop existing for your visual consumption. Look at your wife and mother and say the same words: “You’re finished.”

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

@MritYWrites creation predates, yes. disagreed on the conclusion - timeframe of origin doesnt bar witnessing - to witness is an act in the present. second, neti-netI in essence boils down to verifiability and logic - thus, the path is the mind. Hence, mind -> action -> subconscious -> death.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

My hypothesis is that death is a transitionary wall that allows permeation of internalised subconscious across into another life. Life, then, becomes an act of elevating the subconscious through (micro)reflections on conscious acts.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

@MritYWrites Mind witnesses creation; Brahman interacts with us through mind i.e. the sole transmitter b/w cosmic and human consciousness.
Elevation is an ideal that manifests through repeated actions - reflection on conscious acts builds/shapes a subconscious worthy of inheritance by soul.

[Adi Shankara Quotes (आदि शंकराचार्य) @ShriAdiShankara]

All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All-pervading Vishnu, whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold.

[Yadu @Yaduvam]

Hindu Dharma is truly awe-inspiring! the elegance, symbolism, and sheer beauty are unparalleled.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

CBAM is an evil circumvention of CBDR. As if debt trapping through climate financing wasn't enough that trade is now weaponised to limit global south's course of organic development. Every avenue of geopolitics is glaring evidence of west's imperial pursuits - by hook or crook.

[Handre @Handre]

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

[Icarus @shandilyatri]

Modern constitutional discourse must shift, from justifying policy's post facto secularity, to making policies that preserve conditions that allow meaningful exercise of religion. We must stop batting on the pitch that was never ours to start with.
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[Icarus @shandilyatri]

A constitution engaging deeply with religion is far from a secular constitution. That's why policy and people find themselves at loggerheads for they hardly understand the religiosity acknowledged and channelised within constitutional framework in India.
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