Vishal Vora

[@RealOpinions @RealOpinionOnly]

How is @VFSGlobal @vfsglobalcare still in business. Literally THE WORST company in the world with the WORST experience EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

[Anil Padmanabhan @capitalcalculus]

Wow!

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

@kapoorkkunal @a47merch 1,3,6

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Anjali Singh @AnjaliS87447585]

Omggggggggggg!!!!!!!!! My super favvvvvv post of the day 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@elonmusk even after this if you dont shut down your X in India, broooo you have no self respect 🤣🤣
Indians cooking elon in his own platform🤣🤣

[The Sacred Scroll @SacredScroll]

Gloves are off now, Elon.

Still no licence? Wrong. Starlink got its Unified Licence with GMPCS authorisation from the DoT in June 2025. You know that. Your own VP posted about it.

Ambani is the real boss?

Ambani's Jio lobbied for a spectrum auction. India gave you administrative allocation, the exact thing you asked for. Then you signed distribution deals with Jio and Airtel. If Ambani is blocking you, why is he your reseller?

Five years of complying?

In 2021 you took pre-order money from Indians with no licence at all. The DoT had to order you to stop and refund people. That was your first move in India.

India's home ministry reportedly froze clearances after Starlink terminals showed up in Iran, where you aren't even licensed. Before that, our army pulled one out of a militant cache in Manipur. Your own company says talks are active and productive. So which version is true: the one your VP tells Delhi, or the one you tell 200 million followers?

The spectrum rules were cleared last month and are headed to Cabinet. You're weeks from the finish line, and you're throwing a tantrum in public to rush a sovereign country's security review.

India isn't a market you can bully on X. Wait your turn.

[The Sacred Scroll @SacredScroll]

Nobody in India is against villages getting internet, Elon.
India is against one man holding the off switch.

You already showed us how that works. Ukraine was running tens of thousands of your terminals in a war, and you personally refused to extend coverage near Crimea. Their sea drones lost signal mid-mission. A sovereign country's military operation, cancelled by a businessman's mood.

Then Manipur, December 2024. Our army raids a militant cache. Sitting next to the guns: a Starlink dish. You said the beams were never on over India. Fine. Then explain how your hardware keeps turning up with smugglers and insurgents.

And yesterday you called India's delay a crime against the people of India and blamed unnamed oligarchs. No names. No proof. Just pressure.

Starlink isn't banned. It already has its DoT licence and space regulator approval. What's left is spectrum and security clearance. That's not a conspiracy. That's a country doing its homework before letting a foreign satellite network bypass its own communication controls.

So yes, bring Starlink to that village. Gladly.

On India's terms. Data stays here. Audits happen here. And no switch in Texas decides what works over Indian soil during a crisis.

That's not anti-progress. That's what sovereignty looks like.

[Sajith Pai @sajithpai]

Utterly fascinating nugget on IPs in the chicken-farming industry.

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

@AxisMaxLifeIns is this a valid request. @nsitharamanoffc is this ok. Max axis is not accepting Aadhar documents as proof of identity and address proof and has stopped the layout process. Please help. @irdaindia

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

Not that it matters to @CypherWatches but anyways putting it out here.

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

Hey @CypherWatches . I stay on Navi Mumbai. How does it take 6 days to reach my place from Bhiwandi. AWB 30234043719884. You may wanna pay a bit of attention to actually delivering watches rather than making teasers. Fan of your brand but this ain’t working for me.

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

@Uber_India @UberIN_Support your drivers just cancel trips as they like. How does this work? No remorse. No penalty. How is this ok? Leaving passengers stranded @MORTHIndia @nitin_gadkari sir please help. This is much more prevalent as an issue with Uber as compared to others.

[Satyan Gajwani @satyan]

Our third year of The @EconomicTimes World Leaders Forum comes to a close, bringing together top global political and business leaders. Thanks to all for joining us in showcasing India and creating a home for the most important conversations. #ETWLF26

[Pranab Dhal Samanta @pranabsamanta]

The 'Just in time' era is over. It's now the 'Just in case' era ....policy makers, businesses need to plan accordingly. Because there's also risk in derisking, says Dr S Jaishankar & more... in this detailed fireside chat on a range of issues with me at #ETWLF 👇

https://t.co/bMdDsDeu9z

[Pranab Dhal Samanta @pranabsamanta]

From 'Prohibited unless Permitted' to 'Permitted unless Prohibited', PM Narendra Modi outlines his govt's reform approach at The Economic Times World Leaders Forum. Full text @EconomicTimes

https://t.co/ynikpnfZ29

[SK @sruthijith]

The heady buzz of big production day in our Delhi newsroom for a blockbuster @EconomicTimes edition tomorrow with all the dope from two action-packed days of #ETWLF. Gyaan, glamour, gossip… all getting packaged in. Zero room for error. The distant hum of approaching deadline.

[Anuradha Tiwari @talk2anuradha]

There is a new scam by @IndiGo6E these days.

When you web check-in, they don’t show any free seat options to select.

If you skip seat selection and choose auto-assigned seating, they say you'll receive your boarding pass by email around 4 hours before departure. In my case, it never arrived.

When I called customer care to ask why the boarding pass wasn't sent, they told me that auto-assigned seating can only be done 12 hours before departure. If it isn't assigned by then, the airport has to allocate the seat. They also said they have no way to contact the airport.

So you are forced to reach the airport at least 1 hour early for physical check-in. If you arrive close to the check-in cutoff, they may refuse to issue a boarding pass and say you missed the check-in deadline.

Technically, there are no FREE seats for web check-in.

Everybody is out here scamming common people because apparently there’s nowhere for us to go and complain. Well done!

[Vivek S @xvks42]

@outofofficedaku @VFSGlobal There should be a dedicated website for VFS Stories .

They faked my signature while submitting my passpport to embassy to waive the rejection undetaking as my passport threads were visible. Faked it, Signed it and submitted. Raised a complaint, nothing happened

@blackstone

[Vishal Vora @voravishal]

@MercedesBenzInd @MercedesBenz it’s been about 10-12 days since I paid for my Mercedes Me 3 year subscription. It’s still not activated. Landmark motors Thane tells me the issue is at your end. What’s happening? If you can’t sort it can you issue a refund please?