Srinidhi Balasubramanian

CSE @ IIT Kanpur | AI/NLP | IKS | Digital Humanities

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

I'm still taking it in, but nearly two years later, this tweet has become incredibly significant for me.

On this day of Dhwajārohaṇa in Ayodhya, I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been selected as one of the Adani Indology Fellows.

[Gautam Adani @gautam_adani]

भारत की संस्कृति और परंपराएं विश्व को उज्ज्वलित करने की क्षमता रखती हैं। 'वसुधैव कुटुंबकम' के ��िद्धांत पर चलते हुए, भारतीय संस्कृति, भाषाओं, और साहित्य के अध्ययन यानी 'इंडोलॉजी' को बढ़ावा देना जरूरी है। इसी उद्देश्य से, अदाणी समूह ने अयोध्या राम मंदिर की प्राण प्रतिष्ठा के शुभ अवसर पर इंडोलॉजी में PhD करने के लिए 14 छात्रों को स्पॉन्सर करने का निर्णय लिया है। इससे भारत की सॉफ्ट पॉवर और इंडोलॉजी को वैश्विक पहचान मिलेगी।

[Shivakumar GV INDICA @SaamaanyaJ]

https://t.co/FfcXGaur4Y

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@Arnesh_24 Oh, for real. Totally relate!

[Satish Verma @satoverma]

On the conflict between historical methods versus the religious truths as held by the tradition, we need to make people aware about the distinction between the scope of two different approaches and their respective domain authority. I'll try a meta-approach below.

[Rajiv Malhotra @RajivMessage]

This is what I keep saying for past 20 years, and keep getting attacked by low iq feel good folks. They are being fed bakvas by the media, think tanks, influencers, academics, and all sorts of sarkari mediocre with inflated egos. Sporadic accomplishments here and there get exaggerated to feed the fragile egos.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

Only one quote I'm reminded of, after seeing the pathetic outrage on the sweet story of Captain Bharadhwaj and his partner.

"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love" -- Albus Dumbledore.

[Why U @vayunandini]

A soldier proposed to the woman he loves at his passing out parade. One of the most significant days of his life. And people are angry.

This is what dead inside looks like. Any public expression of love is suddenly performative, inappropriate, attention seeking. We have collectively become so hollow that genuine human emotion makes us uncomfortable and critical.

We expect our defence personnel to bleed on borders, stay away from families for months, miss births and deaths and anniversaries without complaint. But one man choosing the happiest moment of his career to also choose the person he loves and suddenly it is a violation of some sacred code nobody wrote down.

Let the soldier be human. Not everything is a performance. Sometimes it is just a person who survived the hardest training of his life and wanted the woman he loves standing next to him at the finish line. If that bothers you, the problem is entirely yours.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@mayukh_panja @upamanyuacharya Students and young grads should also have an appetite for risk, find comfort in uncertainty and have ambitions that seem impossible. In huge scale.

Needs change from grassroots level in the education, social and economic systems.

Good-kid, good-student syndrome holds us back.

[Upamanyu Acharya @upamanyuacharya]

India will never produce an NVIDIA, and it has nothing to do with talent. R&D is the purest form of investment, and the central bank has spent decades making investment the dumbest thing you can do with a rupee.

I've been surfing the semiconductor wave for a while now, reading 10-Ks for fun. Spent last month in the Bay Area and the gap between India and the US is not a gap; it's a different universe. Conversations about agentic AI and the next decade of hardware, with my boomer relatives Waymo-ing around SF and self-driving home on Tesla FSD like it's normal. Nobody there thinks any of this is remarkable; they already live in the future.

NVIDIA spends nearly twice as much on R&D as every listed company in India combined. Silicon Motion, the world's leading maker of NAND flash controllers and around since 1995, ploughs 29.7% of revenue back into R&D. Micron runs 10.2%, NVIDIA 9.9%, on revenue bases that dwarf anything we have. India Inc? 0.85% of turnover, and half our listed companies report zero R&D at all.

The easy move is to lambast our promoters and the dhandomaxxing capitalist class, or the foreign MNCs running India as a glorified offshoring unit, or the babus who fund nothing useful. Satisfying. But Wrong. The reason no rational Indian founder pours money into frontier R&D is that there is genuinely no payoff at the end of it. Why?

1. R&D compounds, and compounding punishes laggards. At the edge of science a 1-2% gain is a moat; Intel spent 20+ years performing impossible physics every 24 months because Moore's Law was the business model, and that consistency makes them one of the goated companies of all time even after they got mogged recently. NVIDIA lives the same way today: invent at the limit or cease to exist. If you're 50% behind, no quantum of innovation closes that. You never touch the high end. You stay a mass-market producer of things that already exist. India is precisely there.

2. The supply side is the real thesis, and it's monetary. Two decades of high inflation, high money-printing, high nominal rates. That regime subsidises consumption and taxes patience. R&D is the longest-duration, highest-variance bet on the board; it is the first thing a 8% risk-free rate kills. Frontier R&D only ever gets funded two ways: a psychopathically risk-tolerant capitalist with cheap capital, or a state with Stalin-grade control. The USSR took agrarian peasants to the first man in space in 20 years; China built its own version. India has neither the state capacity, the political will, nor the balance sheet to do that. So nobody does it.

Talent was never the bottleneck. Capital structure was. If you want a SpaceX or a TSMC born here, you need an environment where a conglomerate can deploy $10B and sleep at night: a low-rate regime that makes long-duration investment rational, IP and patent courts that actually function, and policy that doesn't get rewritten every 2-3 years on a minister's whim. Stability is the input. Innovation is the output.

Bay Area versus Bombay, we are several universes apart, and you cannot print your way across that distance; you can only compound your way there, and we've spent years optimising for the opposite. The gap won't be bridged. With luck, it narrows.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@_Namrataa @iabhinavKhare And apparently this is a very difficult concept to understand for most ppl 🤯🤯 Neesa 10 rocket scientists to comprehend this much interpersonal relationship nuances. 🫠

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@StardustNenya Instagram and YouTube shorts?
And terrible hostel food?

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Every single one of the points are a real problem.

But your understanding is broken, let me explain. :)

Norway has 55 lakh people. Total. That’s smaller than the population of Pune. Their entire country has fewer citizens than India’s 25 smallest cities individually. Norway also has 1.2 trillion dollars in sovereign wealth from oil reserves, accumulated over 50 years.

They have $250,000 per citizen sitting in the fund. India has roughly $3,400 per citizen in forex reserves.

Norway is what you get when a small population sits on top of one of the largest per-capita oil discoveries in human history.

The right comparison is other low-income, high-population, post-colonial democracies. Brazil. Indonesia. Nigeria. Bangladesh. Pakistan. Egypt. Mexico. South Africa. Vietnam. Philippines.

Compare on these and India isn’t doing badly. It’s doing better than most.

UPI is the world’s largest real-time payments system.

Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identity system.

We absorbed the global pandemic, the Ukraine war, the West Asia conflict, Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war, and a rupee fall without going into recession.

Most of those countries above did. Pakistan went to the IMF 24 times. Sri Lanka collapsed. Bangladesh is unstable. Egypt needed emergency Gulf bailouts. Argentina has 60% inflation. We stayed standing.

India is the only country in human history to add a trillion dollars of GDP every 18 months. We added our first trillion in 2007. Our second in 2017. Our third in 2024. Our fourth coming in 2026.

The problems you mentioned exist in every large, low-income, high-density country on earth.

Mexico City’s pollution is worse than Delhi’s.
Manila’s traffic is worse than Mumbai’s.
Lagos has worse road quality than Delhi.
Jakarta has worse air than Delhi.
Cairo has worse adulteration.
Karachi has more corruption.
Hanoi has higher pollution.

None of these countries are run by Modi. They’re all dealing with the same impossible math.

Industrialising a country of 145 crore people during a global energy transition, with limited natural resources, while keeping democracy intact, is the single hardest governance challenge in human history.

> China did it without democracy.
> South Korea did it with a population one-tenth our size.
> Japan did it with no major religious or linguistic diversity.
> Singapore did it with 50 lakh people total.

Nobody has done it at India’s scale, with our diversity, in democratic conditions.

So when someone asks “why hasn’t Modi built one city like Norway,” the answer is because building one Norway requires not having 144.5 crore other Indians to look after.

[Shivakumar GV INDICA @SaamaanyaJ]

https://t.co/r3Oj7WGxWm

[Sagorika @sagorika_s]

Truly incredibly sad that the few true academics who have pursued critical work in history without bending to global forces and pressures are treated so pathetically. Michel Danino is a scholar beyond reproach and his treatment by NCERT reads like a cautionary tale. It was very exciting to see him as one of the framers, and now, his experiences just make one feel sorry but grateful that he was.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

Apologetic take on the idea of youth.

This whole 'movt.' is running on puerile adrenaline, w/o any rigor, integrity, discipline or restraint.

That is NOT how nation or society is built.

This CJP is exposing several faultlines, that we can no longer afford to ignore or defer.

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

I’m incredibly intrigued by the rise of #CockroachJantaParty, which has already reached more than 15 million followers on @Instagram in just five days.

I understand the frustrations of the youth and see why they are resonating with it. This is precisely why the account being withheld on X is disastrous and deeply unwise - there should be an outlet for the youth to express their feelings and so, let CJP’s account function instead of shutting it down! Democracies need outlets for dissent, humour, satire and even frustration.

I am uncertain about the future of this movement but I hope the youngsters behind it find a way to bring this energy into mainstream politics or perhaps express it through their vote to be a voice of change and in doing so, become impossible to ignore. This is an opportunity that the Opposition must seize.
https://t.co/294SHkmpK2

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@ShashiTharoor @instagram Frustration is no excuse to expose their pathetic IQ and EQ of the so called youth of CJP. These idiocies only prove the point of CJI.
High on adrenaline, zero on discipline, rigor or restraint.
Nations and societies are not formed like this

[IIT Kanpur @IITKanpur]

A moment of immense pride for IIT Kanpur.

Heartiest congratulations to Prof. Manindra Agrawal, @Director_IITK, on being elected as a Fellow of The @royalsociety (FRS), one of the world’s most prestigious scientific honours.

#IITKanpur #DirectorIITK #FRS #RoyalSociety #Science

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

True. But financial independence is not the complete solution. It is just the bare minimum. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
Being independent in terms of the mind and self is equally important, if not more.
The freedom that this combination unlocks for women is powerful.

[Sadhavi Khosla @sadhavi]

Until marriages stop becoming financial transactions disguised as culture, women will continue to suffer silently. Sadly, education does little to prevent this. It’s v important for women to be financially independent, and also brave enough to step out of a bad marriage.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@karthik2k2 Sorry, this is the surest way to aggravate the crisis of youth.

Math is artistic in its very essence. So is literature.

Math is a wonder - testament of mankind's quest for formal truth.

Language is a wonder - testament of mankind's quest for creative truth.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@vvaayu Moderately educated women who leaves her career for marriage for many years and is financially dependent?

Moderately educated women who is concious of family image and impact on children more than her on well being?

Oh please. Next to impossible.

[Srinidhi Balasubramanian @Srinidhitweets]

@imhope_ny Real. And sometimes more dangerous. As you don't even see it or realize it.