Olivia
Online
Vishav Deepak
@vishavdeepak
wannabe cyclist, biker,traveler,explorer,geek,auto enthusiast.Permanently perched on the thin line between practicality and anti-optimism.
Bangalore
Joined March 2009
809 Following
264 Followers
4.2K Posts
ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಜನರು ವರ್ಷಗಳಿಂದ ಕೇಳುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಯನ್ನು ಇಂದು ನೇರವಾಗಿ ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳ ಮುಂದೆ ಇಟ್ಟಿರುವ ಸಚಿವ @krishnabgowda ಅವರಿಗೆ ಅಭಿನಂದನೆಗಳು.
"ಗುಂಡಿರಹಿತ ರಸ್ತೆ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಮಾಡುವುದು ರಾಕೆಟ್ ಸೈನ್ಸ್ನೋ?"
ಎಂಬ ಅವರ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಬ್ಬ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ನಿವಾಸಿಯ ಮನದ ಮಾತಾಗಿದೆ.
ಹೆಚ್ಚು ತೆರಿಗೆ ಪಾವತಿಸುವ ನಗರಕ್ಕೆ ಉತ್ತಮ ರಸ್ತೆಗಳು, ಗುಣಮಟ್ಟದ ಮೂಲಸೌಕರ್ಯ ಮತ್ತು ಜವಾಬ್ದಾರಿಯುತ ಆಡಳಿತ ಸಿಗಲೇಬೇಕು. ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಕೇಳುವುದು ಮೊದಲ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ,ಈಗ ಅದನ್ನು ಕಾರ್ಯರೂಪಕ್ಕೆ ತರುವ ಸಮಯ.
ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುಗೆ ಗುಂಡಿರಹಿತ ರಸ್ತೆಗಳನ್ನು ನೀಡುವ ದಿಟ್ಟ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ.
#Bengaluru #KrishnaByreGowda #PotholeFreeBengaluru
be @ni5arga
→ 19 years old, from West Bengal, studied in Delhi for a few years
→ just finished his own Class 12 exams in 2026
→ calls himself a hobbyist cybersecurity researcher
→ says he is an engineer, not a hacker
→ built an OSINT engine, a stock-tracking TUI, a pastebin in Rust
→ once found bugs in FOSS United and disclosed them quietly
→ just another CBSE student watching his own board roll out a new digital marking system
then he opened the portal
→ CBSE moves Class 12 evaluation to On-Screen Marking, 1.8 million students affected
→ Nisarga sees the portal link is fully public, gets curious
→ opens DevTools, downloads the Angular JavaScript bundle
→ first vulnerability found in 30 minutes
→ a literal master password sitting in plain text inside the frontend code
→ enter it, the OTP field auto-fills, the entire login flow gets bypassed
→ OTP validation happens in the user's browser, not on the server
→ no route guards, every internal page reachable by editing browser storage
→ password reset API never checks the old password
→ systemic IDOR across the entire API, change one value in sessionStorage, become any examiner
→ outcome: take over any teacher account, view answer sheets, edit marks
25 February 2026. He reports everything to CERT-In the same day.
→ CERT-In asks for a screen recording, he sends a full walkthrough
→ acknowledgement comes back as a boilerplate reply
→ reference number assigned: CERTIn-16590126
→ he follows up multiple times. no response.
→ three months pass. portal still live. Class 12 results released. vulnerabilities still there.
→ 22 May: publishes the blog post and a thread on X
→ Deedy Das, Satish Acharya, Internet Freedom Foundation amplify it
→ the post goes viral
→ CBSE issues a clarification: that was just a test portal, no breach
→ the URL CBSE cited in their own tweet was not even a registered domain
→ a friend buys the domain and points it at Nisarga's blog
→ CBSE quietly deletes the tweet
then it gets worse
→ 25 May: finds an SQL injection vulnerability on the live production portal
→ reports to CERT-In, gets a one-line thank you
→ gains admin access to the live https://t.co/1WpmNGsczK server
→ portal stays up for four more hours
→ he uploads anime videos and memes, links them publicly from CBSE servers
→ plays a viral Japanese song on a CBSE page, makes the news for it
→ CBSE finally takes the whole portal down
then he reads the database
→ master table accessed: 10 GB, 9.3 million records
→ examiner names, addresses, school names, bank account details
→ passwords stored in plain text
→ login tokens anyone can paste into a browser to log in as that user
→ 31 May: finds a second live CBSE production portal, 45,074 records of failed payments
→ emails, phone numbers, payment IDs, order IDs, all readable
→ 31 May, the bigger one: an AWS S3 bucket is misconfigured
→ ListObjectsV2 works without authentication, the bucket root is listable
→ samples pulled from 18 lakh scanned 2026 answer sheets, every subject
→ multiple institutions sharing the same bucket
→ also notices something strange in the scans: bedsheets visible in the background of answer sheets CBSE paid for proper scanners to handle
CBSE responds
→ posts an AI-generated image saying the system is robust and secure
→ three days later admits some vulnerabilities existed and have been contained
→ refuses to name the cybersecurity firm doing the audit
→ claims they tried contacting him. he says they have not.
→ Internet Freedom Foundation writes to the Ministry of Education and CERT-In
→ asks for an investigation into CBSE, a review of the contract with vendor Coempt EduTeck, a full audit
→ he points out he could have sold this data and made a lot of money
→ he did not. he is a CBSE student too.
→ his own analogy: the door wasn't just unlocked. the key was lying on the ground in front of everyone.
a 19-year-old with a anima pff broke a national exam evaluation system in 30 minutes with browser developer tools and the government is still pretending it was a test environment
This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.
Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.
Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.
He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.
The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.
Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.
A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.
So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.
The tender was issued three times.
> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.
> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.
> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.
Here is what changed, one by one.
01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.
02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.
03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.
04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.
05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.
06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.
07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.
08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.
09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.
10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.
11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.
12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.
13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.
These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.
The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.
Following things need to happen immediately;
1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?
Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)
Her name is Aradhana Prakash.
She was 14 years old in August 1990. Ruchika Girhotra’s best friend. A fellow tennis trainee at the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association.
She was in the room when S P S Rathore called them both to his office. He sent her out on a pretext. When she returned she found Ruchika distressed.
She was the sole eyewitness. The only person who could testify to what happened that day.
For 19 years Rathore tried to silence her.
He filed civil case after civil case against her family. Cases against journalists covering the story. Cases against the lawyers fighting it.
Ruchika died in December 1993. Her father and brother were harassed so badly they had to leave Panchkula entirely.
Aradhana and her parents stayed.
Her father Anand Prakash and mother Madhu Prakash attended over 400 hearings across 19 years. Every single one. They never settled. They were never intimidated.
The court found Aradhana’s testimony unimpeachable. The judgment relied on her as the sole witness to convict Rathore in December 2009.
When Rathore was attacked outside court by a member of the public she went on television and asked people not to take the law into their own hands. She said that for 19 years they had always worked within the law.
Her father Anand Prakash died of prostate cancer in January 2018 aged 74. He had attended more than 400 hearings. He lived long enough to see Rathore convicted. He did not live long enough to see justice feel complete.
Yesterday, many people here read the story of Ruchika Girhotra for the first time.
Most of them had never even heard her name before.
They should.
Follow for stories India deserves to remember.
Who to follow
Her name was Ruchika Girhotra.
She was 14 years old. A tennis player from Panchkula, Haryana.
On August 12 1990, she went to meet S.P.S. Rathore at his office. He was the Inspector General of Police and head of the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association. He had promised her father he would arrange special coaching for her.
When her friend stepped out of the room, he molested her.
Her family filed a complaint three days later.
Rathore had her expelled from school. Her father was suspended from his bank job on false charges. Six cases were filed against her brother Ashu. The family's house was forcibly sold. They fled to the outskirts of Shimla and took up earth filling work to survive.
On December 28 1993, days after Ashu was paraded in handcuffs through their neighbourhood, Ruchika consumed poison.
She died the next day. She was 17.
Rathore threw a party that night.
He then refused to release her body to her father unless he signed blank papers. Those papers were later used to forge documents accepting a false autopsy report.
Despite a police inquiry recommending an FIR against him, Rathore kept getting promoted. He became the Director General of Police of Haryana in 1999.
The case went through 40 adjournments and more than 400 hearings over 19 years.
In December 2009 a court convicted him of molestation. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and fined Rs 1,000.
The sentence was later enhanced to 18 months. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 2016 but reduced it to the time already served. He walked free.
The judge who tried to add abetment to suicide charges against him was forced into premature retirement.
The judge who dismissed those charges was a neighbour of Ruchika's family involved in a property dispute with them.
S.P.S. Rathore was later invited as a VIP guest to a Republic Day event in Panchkula.
Ruchika Girhotra was 14 when he molested. She was 17 when she died.
Follow for stories India deserves to remember.
Aerial view of Bengaluru’s much-awaited double-decker flyover from Silk Board to Ragigudda - now fully open to the public in both directions!
Today is World Liver Day 2026.
Here are 8 things your liver actually wants you to know.
1
There is no such thing as a "liver detox."
Your liver runs phase I and II detoxification 24/7 on its own.
No juice cleanse, no milk thistle, no herbal detox speeds this up.
In fact several have caused liver injury - the opposite of the claim.
2
Alcohol has no safe dose.
Liver harm begins from the first drink.
The old "moderate drinking is protective" myth came from flawed studies contaminated by abstainer bias - now debunked by Mendelian randomization.
Zero ml is best.
3
"Natural" supplements are now a leading cause of acute liver failure.
Ashwagandha. Green tea extract. Garcinia. Kratom. High-dose turmeric. Giloy/Tinospora.
They dominate drug-induced liver injury registries across India, the US, and Europe.
Natural ≠ safe.
4
Coffee is genuinely liver-protective.
2–3 cups/day (caffeinated or decaf) lowers the risk of fibrosis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.
One of the very few dietary interventions with real, replicated evidence.
5
Fatty liver (MASLD) now affects ~1 in 3 adults worldwide.
A 7–10% body-weight loss:
• clears Liver fat
• reduces inflammation
• can regress early fibrosis
No approved drug currently beats this. Your plate and feet are the first-line therapy.
6
Sugar-sweetened drinks independently cause fatty liver.
Fructose is metabolized almost entirely by the liver - straight into fat.
One daily soda raises MASLD risk even after adjusting for total calories.
Lesser is better.
7
Get vaccinated against hepatitis B. Get screened for HBV and HCV at least once in your lifetime.
HBV vaccine prevents >95% of chronic infection, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.
Hepatitis C is curable in 8-12 weeks with >95% success - but most carriers don't know they have it.
8
Exercise protects the liver independent of weight loss.
150 min/week moderate OR 75 min vigorous activity reduces liver fat and stiffness - even when the scale doesn't move.
Movement is "medicine".
🫂
PS: we also need a liver emoji
A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.
Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.
It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.
The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.
When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.
Just when you think bannerghatta road can not get any worse …. The authorities prove us wrong !!!!
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.
That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.
Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.
These men are something more painful than monsters.
They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.
That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here.
Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.
That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.
That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken open with grief.
That is all it needed to be.
Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
The final moments for Harish Rana are almost here - the young man whose family petitioned for his right to die after he fell into a vegetative state for 13 years as as result of a fall- I can scarcely watch this without tearing up - what courage it would take his parents . God Bless
The degradation of the human spirit is so widespread one goes numb thinking about it.
A bankrupt island nation of 22 million people just taught every great power on Earth a lesson in leverage.
Sri Lanka’s President Dissanayake stood before cameras on 6 March and said: “We are neutral but also humanitarian. Sri Lanka is a free and non-aligned nation. We do not favour any country. We treat every human being equally, whether Iranian, American, or Israeli. We jealously guard our non-aligned policy while ensuring that humanitarian values and the saving of lives remain our top priority.”
Then he granted free one-month humanitarian visas to all 236 Iranian sailors, the 32 survivors pulled from the wreckage of the IRIS Dena and 204 crew evacuated from the disabled IRIS Bushehr. He described sheltering them as “the most courageous and humanitarian course of action a state can take.”
The United States, which sank the Dena using USS Charlotte (SSN-766), a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine firing Mk 48 heavyweight torpedoes 19 to 44 nautical miles off Galle, is pressuring Colombo through a State Department cable to retain the sailors under conditions favourable to American intelligence access. Washington wants the 32 survivors who witnessed classified US submarine engagement tactics.
China, which holds Hambantota port under a 99-year lease 90 kilometres from the sinking site, says nothing publicly. The debt speaks for itself.
India, which hosted the Dena at its MILAN 2026 exercise weeks before the ship was sunk by India’s closest strategic partner, has not uttered a single word about any of it.
Iran is broadcasting the rescue footage across every state media channel. Eighty-seven dead sailors and a neutral nation that refused American demands.
And Sri Lanka, sovereign-defaulted in 2022, currently under IMF conditionality, owing billions to Beijing through Belt and Road, dependent on Indian goodwill for regional security, and sitting at the intersection of every great-power pressure line in the Indian Ocean, chose international law.
UNCLOS Article 98 required the rescue. Geneva Convention II Article 17 required the internment. Hague Convention XIII prohibited allowing the sailors to re-enter combat. Sri Lanka followed every obligation to the letter. Uruguay did the same during the Falklands. Switzerland did the same throughout World War II. The law is unambiguous. The politics are not.
This is the same Sri Lanka that founded the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. That hosted the fifth NAM summit in 1976. That proposed the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace in 1971 and got the UN to adopt it. And that is now pursuing BRICS partner status under India’s 2026 chairmanship, with Prime Minister Amarasuriya calling membership “strategically appealing” on 6 March, the same week her government was sheltering Iranian sailors against American objections.
Every major power assumed Sri Lanka would fold. Washington assumed economic leverage would force compliance. Beijing assumed debt would ensure silence. Delhi assumed proximity would guarantee deference. Tehran assumed sympathy would guarantee solidarity.
Instead, Colombo followed the law, issued the visas, sheltered the sailors, and told every great power exactly the same thing: we are neutral, we are humanitarian, and we do not take sides.
The weakest economy in the Indian Ocean just demonstrated the strongest foreign policy.
Full analysis for paid subscribers.
https://t.co/eMrt5qYYst
This is depressing but worth the watch.
Good Parenting!
I Phone 19 से पढ़ाई करके Topper ☠️🗿
कुछ कहानियाँ ऐसी होती हैं जिन्हें बताना और समाज तक पहुंचाना बहुत ज़रूरी होता है. #BandBaajaBitiya उन में से एक है. शायद इसलिए, जब कहानी सुनी तो लगा यह सिर्फ एक फ़िल्म नहीं…ज़िम्मेदारी है.
धन्यवाद @goeltmt और #Sandeepgoel का इस विषय को उठाने के लिए. और मुझे इसका हिस्सा बनाने के लिए.
यह कहानी support की है. अगर अच्छी लगे तो share कीजिए, support कीजिए.
#SupportIsStrength
There are stories that insist on being told because society needs to hear them.
Perhaps that’s why, when I first heard #BandBaajaBitiya, it felt like more than just a film… it felt like a responsibility.
Thank you, Goel TMT and Sandeep Goel ji, for championing this subject and for making me a part of it.
This is a story about support. If it moves you, please share it. Support it. #SupportIsStrength
Those cheering the impending unemployment of Bangalore's IT workers due to AI - you will lose your jobs too. Don't laugh so fast.
Bangalore's upper middle class was built on IT services. It is these IT "coolies" as you so derisively call them, who formed the target market for the glitzy pubs, cafes and malls. They are the reason your flats get so much rent. Their kids are the ones populating the trendy joints in Koramangala and HSR. It is their money that is buying your organic kombucha and kale salad.
Azim Premji University was built by Wipro money. IISc researchers vie for the Infosys prize. Mohandas Pai's IT investments got you the Museum of Art and Photography.
Your artsy bookstore is supported by the full stack developer writing ugly SQL queries. Those DSLR toting pure veg thindi walkers? Thats what they do on weekends. They sit in AC offices on weekdays, with an open sewer next door.
Your public policy think tank that serves cauliflower rice and tofu skewers for lunch? It was funded by a bunch of IT entrepreneurs. You were hired there because your daddy cleared the UPSC exam 30 years ago, and will look the other way during tax filing season. Or did you think you got that wonk job with your comparative lit crit skills?
Those hipster bulgogi joints in Kammanhattan need Python money to survive. Those artisanal barbers will go back to using used razors if their RazorPay traffic dies down.
Bangalore runs on IT. This is your Niemoller moment.
Mandatory disclosure: I am an Infosys shareholder.
The fact he gave this speech while dying tells you all you need to know about him.
Lovely Tribute to Sarla Maheshwari by Doordarshan! ॐ शांति 🙏
Last Seen Users on Sotwe
Trends for you
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
240.5M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.7M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
110.4M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.6M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.9M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
87.5M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
81.4M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.9M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.7M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
69.7M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.7M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.8M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
62.4M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
X
@x
60.8M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
60.6M followers