Tech, Policy, Digital, Green | India's 1st GRIHA Home | Stephanian | Xaverian | [email protected]
New Delhi, India
Joined July 2008
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"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented": Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech 1986
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
To make a steel plate shine, you have to grind a thin layer of metal off of it.
That metal turns into black dust, and it has to end up somewhere. In shops like this one, it ends up on the guys holding the plates, and in their lungs.
The fan that would pull it out of the air costs about $400 in India, which is roughly eight times what the polishing machine itself costs. So a lot of small shops just never buy one.
Look at what's stacked on the floor, too. Those are compartment thalis, the steel plates you'd find in pretty much every Indian kitchen and a lot of Indian restaurants here in the US.
They come off the press a dull gray. To get the mirror finish, a worker presses each one into a spinning wheel loaded with black emery compound, which is the coarsest stuff you can polish with. As the wheel shaves the surface down, the steel dust (chromium and nickel included) gets mixed up with the compound's grease and bits of cotton tearing off the wheel. With no hood over the wheel, all of it floats around the room until it lands on the walls, the floor and the workers. That's the black coating you see in their hair.
Researchers who studied a small stainless steel utensil factory in Tamil Nadu found that 38% of the workers in the polishing section had hearing loss. Among workers who didn't use protective gear, about 15% had bronchial asthma.
You'd think a safety inspector would eventually show up and make them buy the fan, but the law just moved the other way. Last November, India swapped out its 1948 Factories Act for a new safety code, and it doubled the number of workers it takes for a shop to legally count as a "factory." For shops running powered machines, that line went from 10 workers to 20. A shop with fewer than 10 people falls outside the general safety code entirely. So a 15-person polishing shop was a factory on November 20, 2025, and the next morning it wasn't.
And this is a huge chunk of the industry. India's stainless steel trade association has said about half the country's stainless ends up as utensils, and around 40% of it is made by small and mid-size companies.
America used to have this exact room. Back in August 1913, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a report on dust in American workshops. It had photos of men buffing brass with no dust removal at all, printed right next to wheels fitted with hoods and blowers.
Basically, the fix for everything in this video has been sitting in a US government report for 113 years, and it's just a hood and a fan.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Easily one of the best books we've published. I consider this one of our hidden gems:
reading this beautiful story reminded me of my friend Meeto Malik, who took her own life twenty years ago while working on a PhD on syncretism in Punjab
theguardian.com/global-devel…
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
The Learjet 60 that crashed in Palm Beach County today went from 35,000 ft to the ground in 76 seconds.
I rebuilt the last 3 minutes in 4D from ADS-B, ATC audio, a NEXRAD analysis and dashcam video, then ran the engineering. Here's what the data says, and what it doesn't. 🧵
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Trump says he could have won the Vietnam War in a week.
By bombing Ho Chi Minh City.
IDIOT. The United States was defending Ho Chi Minh city, the capitol of South Vietnam. The enemy was North Vietnam, it's capitol is Hanoi.
And by the way the United States did conduct limited bombing near Hanoi, but direct bombing of Hanoi itself would likely have drawn China or the Soviet Union into directly fighting against the United States.
My God. This stupid violent idiot is Commander in Chief of the United States.
Trump:
I could have won the Vietnam War in a week.
They kept bombing forests for years instead of going after Ho Chi Minh City.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Ho Chi Minh City was called Saigon during the Vietnam War and was the capital of US-allied South Vietnam; North Vietnam's capital was Hanoi.
britannica.com/place/Ho-Chi-M…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_S…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Mi…
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Sapru is wrong on the core point. BBC Urdu posted correctly in Urdu naming Nidhi Razdan and using "India's administered Kashmir." The garbled English ("Nadeem Raza," "caretaker") is Meta/Facebook's auto-translate, not BBC's text. Zeeshan is right that the attack rests on a false premise.
Awful. M3M leaks its own CCTV footage to a "social media influencer" and pays her to tweet it out to counter the resident they're harassing. @gurgaonpolice
This quoted post is unavailable.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
My complaint against @gautam_adani Ji and @narendramodi Ji and their associates against the crimes committed, we need support and good wishes from all who want to eradicate corruption. #AdaniGate #AdaniBribe #ModaniGate
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Last night IFF, @SFLCin and @geoblockedindia received a legal notice said to be issued purportedly on behalf of the RSS. It’s hard to believe this comes from an organisation that has had a century to practise its paperwork and hence this may even be a weird prank! This notice asks us to stop criticising the Government’s blocking orders and stop documenting them. It also wants us to confirm in writing within seven days (seriously).
We can tell it’s an excellent teaching aid and here are seven lessons from it.
1) Say who you are: The notice names no advocate and gives no enrollment number. It is signed by an “Authorised Signatory” with no name. Replies go to a free Proton Mail ID, and the “office” is a residential flat in outer Delhi. A notice that can’t tell you who sent it is less a legal document than a weather event.
2) Have a grievance of your own: It never says how its client is harmed when we criticise a MeitY advisory. It complains on behalf of the Government’s blocking orders. The Union has no shortage of lawyers, and it hasn’t asked for volunteers.
3) Name the law: It threatens “appropriate legal action” under “the applicable provisions of law” and doesn’t cite a single section of any statute. A threat with no law, is literally an empty threat.
4) Don’t ask people to give up a fundamental right within seven days: The first demand is that we stop “publicly opposing” government directions. In Shreya Singhal (2015), the Supreme Court held that discussion and advocacy of a cause, however unpopular, sit at the heart of Article 19(1)(a). Opposing an order is how its legality gets tested. That is the Constitution working as intended.
5) Check whether the courts asked for the thing you want stopped” In Anuradha Bhasin (2020), the Supreme Court held that orders restricting fundamental rights must be made available so people can challenge them. The Reddit order is on the public Lumen Database because Reddit put it there. Reading a public database and saying what’s in it has a name. It’s called research.
6) Show us the spark and the powder keg: The notice says our work weakens national security measures, but it gives no instance, date or harm. In S. Rangarajan (1989), the Supreme Court held that the danger feared from speech can’t be remote, conjectural or far-fetched. It has to be like a spark in a powder keg. A post about a Lumen filing is not a spark.
7) Read it once more before you press send: The paragraphs run 1, then an empty 2 and 3, then 4. A PIN code wanders into the facts. The account it targets is on “Twitter”.
Our reply is short. The notice is legally deficient because it makes no material allegation and cites no illegality. We will respectfully continue to advance constitutional rights, as we have done before. Notices like this rarely expect to win in court. They expect the recipient to get tired. We often are tired, but it has never changed what we do. Solidarity with @SFLCin and @geoblockedindia.
If your post or account has been blocked in India, write to [email protected].
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Hello @NetflixIndia the next time you want to name a reporter character Sandhya, show her uncovering illegal sand mining, create a Tamil villain, and pick bits & pieces from MY real life story which was pitched to you TWICE in 2022 and 2023, AND not give me any credit at the least.... Think hard and well.
Thankfully it was a supremely crappy movie with ham performances and @ParineetiChopra was nothing like me. In fact she was nothing like any reporter & the newsroom portrayal was idiotic & amateurish. You've been clever enough to try & escape a lawsuit by altering the story enough.
You owe me a public apology at the very least but I'm certain you have no moral fibre in you to do so.
Shame on you all, especially the director-writer Dhruv Tripathi. Stealing other people's hard work and making money sneakily out of it.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Wow. I uploaded a post on food fearmongering on Instagram with the big man's image as sattire on what to fear and what not, and Instagram within seconds, restricted it in India. So any post, even if it is on food or movies or whatever, if it features the man's face anywhere on the post, will be instantly restricted in India as per new IT Rules. This happens especially on accounts like mine. Has anyone had such an experience? I mean this is really absurd. I had to delete the whole post and put a new one without the emperor's face on it.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
En janvier 1972, une erreur de planning a placé Vesna Vulović, une hôtesse de l'air de 22 ans, sur un vol qu'elle n'était absolument pas censée assurer. Une collègue portant le même prénom avait été affectée à cette liaison, mais l'erreur passa inaperçue ; et Vesna, toujours aussi décontractée, se présenta simplement au travail et embarqua.
Quarante-cinq minutes après le décollage du vol JAT 367 depuis Copenhague, une bombe dissimulée dans une mallette explosa dans la soute à bagages avant de l'appareil. L'avion ne se contenta pas de perdre de l'altitude ; il se disloqua instantanément à 33 330 pieds (environ 10 160 mètres) au-dessus des montagnes gelées de Tchécoslovaquie.
Alors que tous les autres passagers et membres d'équipage furent projetés dans le vide, Vesna, elle, ne le fut pas.
Elle se trouvait dans la section arrière de l'appareil au moment de l'explosion. Un chariot de service la percuta violemment, la plaquant contre le fuselage. Ce hasard physique lui sauva probablement la vie. Tandis que les autres chutaient à travers les nuages, elle demeura piégée à l'intérieur d'un tube de métal en train de se désagréger, en état de chute libre totale.
La queue de l'avion plongea sur plus de six miles (environ 10 kilomètres). Elle percuta en biais le flanc escarpé et enneigé d'une montagne ; les arbres et l'épaisse couche de neige amortirent l'impact juste assez pour empêcher le fuselage d'être totalement pulvérisé.
Dans l'obscurité de l'épave, au milieu du silence de la forêt, quelque chose bougea.
Elle hurlait.
Un habitant du coin, nommé Bruno Honke — un ancien infirmier militaire ayant servi durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale — fut le premier à l'entendre. Il se fraya un chemin à travers la neige et les débris pour découvrir une jeune femme vivante au milieu d'une épave à laquelle nul être humain n'était censé survivre.
Ses blessures étaient catastrophiques : crâne fracturé, trois vertèbres brisées et les deux jambes fracassées. Les médecins conseillèrent à sa famille de se préparer au pire, convaincus que, même si elle survivait, elle ne marcherait plus jamais.
Ils ne connaissaient pas Vesna Vulović.
Après seize mois d'opérations chirurgicales et d'une rééducation acharnée, elle sortit de l'hôpital, marchant sur ses deux jambes. Le personnel médical, qui avait un jour douté qu'elle puisse même respirer sans assistance, la regarda s'éloigner dans un silence stupéfait.
Elle finit par reprendre son travail au sein de la même compagnie aérienne et, fait remarquable, ne développa jamais la moindre peur de l'avion. Elle devint une héroïne nationale en Yougoslavie et détient toujours le record du monde Guinness de la chute la plus haute survécue sans parachute. Le quiproquo qui l'a placée à bord de ce vol aurait pu mettre un terme à son histoire avant même qu'elle ne commence véritablement. Au lieu de cela, il a offert au monde l'une des histoires de survie les plus incroyables jamais relatées.
Certaines personnes n'en ont tout simplement pas encore fini.fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_…
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Amitabh Bachchan sir has 45 million followers here.
His word carries weight. With this reach he can spark conversations and inspire millions to talk and act on common issues like women safety, road safety, environmental protection etc.
Instead, he chooses to say this 🙏🏽
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Ten million people have watched a comedian accidentally destroy the entire TED talk industry.
He filmed the talk once at TEDxNewYork in 2014 and openly admitted he had nothing to say.
Speaking coaches charge $5,000 to teach the exact tricks he used in 6 minutes to say nothing at all.
His name is Will Stephen. He is a comedian from Late Night with Seth Meyers who was invited to give a real TED talk and used it to prove the format is a costume anyone can wear.
Every TED speaker opens with a question, tells a personal story, cites a scientist, and shows a chart. Stephen did all four in six minutes with zero content.
His entire formula fits on a napkin.
Gesture with both hands. Ask the audience a question anyone can answer. Tell a mildly embarrassing story so they say aww. Point to a stranger on a slide and call them important. Flash a chart of random numbers. Wear glasses with no lenses. The audience will think you are brilliant.
That last trick alone has probably cost the public speaking coaching industry a hundred million dollars in sessions clients should have skipped.
"If you watched me on YouTube with the sound off, you would think I was a genius."
That is Will Stephen on the TED stage, three minutes into the talk he was paid to give. He wasn't lying.
Executives pay $15,000 for a keynote coach and still open with a joke the room never laughs at. Founders rehearse their pitch for weeks and still sound like Stephen at minute four, saying "wagga wah, gabba gabba" with authority.
The talk is free on YouTube. The method is written across every TED speaker's playbook for ten years.
Stephen still writes for Seth Meyers. Almost none of the ten million viewers have stopped nodding at empty slides since.
The formula is free. The willingness to actually say something before your next keynote, pitch, or townhall is the entire edge.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
DIGIPUB News India Foundation condemns Hostinger’s wiping of paranjoy.in, 12 years of Paranjoy Guha Thakurta’s journalism. That’s not law, it’s backdoor censorship. DIGIPUB stands with Paranjoy @paranjoygt.
PKR | প্রশান্ত | پرشانتو retweeted
Please restore this asap @Hostinger
This is shameful
PUBLIC STATEMENT BY PARANJOY GUHA THAKURTA
On the arbitrary takedown of paranjoy.in by Hostinger following legal notices from Indiabulls founder Sameer Gehlaut
October 31, 2026
On the morning of October 28, 2026, my website paranjoy.in and all its associated subdomains, including media.paranjoy.in and adanifiles.paranjoy.in, were abruptly taken offline by our web hosting provider, Hostinger (HOSTINGER operations, UAB). The website, registered twelve years ago, serves as an online archive of my work over several decades as a journalist, author, publisher, and maker of documentary films and music videos
Hostinger gave no prior intimation, warning, or opportunity to respond before suspending the entire hosting account. When my colleague contacted Hostinger “Support” at 6:48 AM on October 28, a hosting “specialist” stated that the suspension was triggered by an abuse report for "Fraud/Scam" and declared that "unsuspension is not negotiable in this case."
This sudden shutdown of an entire repository under the label "Fraud/Scam" happened just days after Sameer Gehlaut, founder of the Indiabulls group, served me with an ex parte court order demanding the removal of a single article published more than seven years on Newsclick.in.
For over six years, Indiabulls and Shri Gehlaut have pursued legal action over this report and I have consistently defended our journalistic report in court. Here is the timeline:
· March 11, 2020: Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited filed a criminal defamation complaint (CC No. 1765/2020) before the Patiala House Courts, New Delhi, against NewsClick, its Reader's Editor Urmilesh, co-author of the article Sourodipto Sanyal, NewsClick editor Prabir Purkayastha, and me over an article published on the website on September 30, 2019.
· June 6, 2025 and July 9, 2025: More than five years after the complaint was filed, a Judicial Magistrate at Patiala House Courts passed an order on June 6, 2025, dropping proceedings against Shri Purkayastha while issuing summons to the remaining four accused, including me, under Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code. A formal summons was issued on July 9, 2025, for appearance on July 30, 2025.
· August 27, 2026: Counsel for Shri Gehlaut, sent me a legal notice demanding the takedown of the article within 24 to 48 hours, claiming that a status report by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi Police had altered the factual position.
· September 2, 2026: My counsel sent a reply pointing out concerns with the legal notice
· October 24, 2026: Indiabulls Nests Limited (Plaintiff No. 1) and Sameer Gehlaut (Plaintiff No. 2) obtained an ex parte ad interim injunction from the Court of one of the District and Sessions Judges, Patiala House Courts, New Delhi, in Civil Suit No. 529/2026 (Indiabulls Nests Ltd. & Anr. v. Ashok Kumar/John Doe & Ors.), in which I am arrayed as Defendant No. 19. The order directed the removal and de-indexing of the article on paranjoy.in (listed as Item A-33 in Schedule A).
· October 25, 2026 (10:13 AM IST): Advocates representing Indiabulls Nests Limited and Sameer Gehlaut, emailed me the October 24 court order and suit documents, demanding immediate deletion and written confirmation of compliance.
· October 26, 2026 (11:33 PM IST): Sameer Gehlaut personally sent an email from his official address ([email protected]) demanding the immediate deletion of the URL from paranjoy.in and threatening to move the court under Order XXXIX Rule 2A of the Code of Civil Procedure if I did not comply, noting that the matter is next listed on December 18, 2026. While I was in the process of challenging the order dated 24.10.2026 before higher forums, on the same day, advocates representing Shri Gehlaut submitted a court order takedown complaint to Google LLC.
· October 28, 2026 (3:16 PM IST): Google Search Console sent an automated notice ([WNC-598900]) informing me that Google was blocking the specific URL paranjoy.in/article/the-maze… from appearing in search results on google.co.in.
The Lumen Database record of this complaint (Notice ID: 101001876) reveals the scale of the takedown request. The complaint targeted 52 URLs on websites across major national and international news organisations, including The Economic Times, Business Standard, The Caravan, The Daily Pioneer, Business Today, Deccan Herald, ET Now, Financial Express, Livemint, Moneycontrol, Moneylife, NDTV Profit, The New Indian Express, Outlook Business, The Quint, Quartz, and NewsClick, along with posts on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Scribd.
Most of these reports on major corporate news websites remain accessible online. In fact, Item 39 on the Lumen takedown list is the original September 30, 2019 article published on NewsClick.in: newsclick.in/The-Maze-of-Pol…, which remains live and accessible as of now.
Yet, in the case of paranjoy.in, the entire domain and every website hosted on my account were wiped off the internet.
Hostinger's Baseless "Fraud/Scam" Claim and Demand for Accountability
Hostinger did not cite the Patiala House Courts order when it suspended my account on October 28, 2026. Instead, its representative claimed that the hosting account was permanently suspended due to an abuse report for "Fraud/Scam".
This allegation is demonstrably false:
1. VirusTotal Security Analysis: Independent domain checks conducted on October 28, 2026, at 7:48 AM and 7:54 AM on VirusTotal confirm that 0 out of 92 security vendors flagged paranjoy.in or media.paranjoy.in as malicious, phishing, or fraudulent. VirusTotal explicitly categorises paranjoy.in under "news and media".
2. Google Safe Browsing Status: Checks on the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic tool at 7:55 AM and 7:56 AM on October 28, 2026, for both paranjoy.in and adanifiles.paranjoy.in returned the status: "No unsafe content found".
My website paranjoy.in does not sell financial products, solicit funds for commercial schemes, or engage in any activity that could remotely be classified as a scam. It is a repository of public-interest journalism, books, documentary films, and investigative reports built over a lifetime of work. By acting on a fabricated "Fraud/Scam" abuse report without a single verification check or prior notice to the domain owner, Hostinger has allowed its abuse-reporting mechanism to be weaponised to censor an independent journalist.
Even where a court order directs the removal or de-indexing of a specific URL, a web hosting provider has no legal or ethical justification to pull down an entire domain and hundreds of unrelated articles, archives, and subdomains without notice.
I demand immediate answers and accountability from Hostinger:
1. Who submitted the false "Fraud/Scam" abuse report against paranjoy.in, and on what exact date and time was it received?
2. What internal verification did Hostinger's abuse team conduct before classifying a 12-year-old journalism portal as a "Fraud/Scam" site, especially when 92 security vendors on VirusTotal and Google Safe Browsing show zero malicious or unsafe content?
3. Why was no prior notice, warning, or copy of the complaint sent to me before suspending the entire hosting account?
4. On what basis did Hostinger's specialist declare that the suspension of an entire archive of journalistic work is "not negotiable"?
While my legal advisers are in the process of taking appropriate steps in court regarding the ex parte order dated October 24, 2026, and the wholesale suspension of my website, this backdoor censorship through web hosting providers sets a dangerous precedent for the independence of the media and freedom of expression as enshrined in Article (19)(1)(a) of the Constitution of India as a fundamental right of every citizen of India.
Yours sincerely
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Independent Journalist, Author, Publisher and Maker of Documentary Films and Music Videos
Yikes. What next, US-style school shootings?
Horrific attack at Anantapur School: 21-year-old enters classroom with power chainsaw, one girl killed another Injured. the attack took place inside the classroom while a teacher was present and lessons were underway. Police launch a hunt to nab the accused. #AndhraPradesh