By playing Hindutva politics, AAP is targetting Muslims!

The @AamAadmiParty is provoking violence in Delhi. Violence against Muslims. It needs to be said clearly and loudly.

It also needs to be countered strongly, says professor

"Narendra Modi declared as the most popular world leader" (a short thread). Recently, an image started doing rounds where Modi was pronounced as the most popular world leader. Let me tell you how it happened. (1/n)

This is the image that is being used by most of the BJP followers to beat their chest. But something very interesting caught my eye when I tried to go into the details of how of it. (2/n)

The survey was done by a US based company called Morning Consult who boasts of their political intelligence and analysis.

So Morning Consult says it has millions of users to interview and a revolutionary system to analyse the data. It tells us that any survey this company does should be taken as the Gospel.

Now remember the world population as of Jun 13, 2020 was 7.5 Billion. Remember it because we will need this info later.

In this thread, I will discuss the division of earth into continents, and how the term “Jambūdwīpa” जम्बूद्वीप, perhaps attested the most number of times in world literature as a continent, lost out to the bastard time “South Asia”.

India must reclaim the term “Jambūdwīpa”.

The word “Jambūdwīpa” is attested not just in India, but in the whole Asian literature. This is how Asian civilizations like India, China, Japan etc. have seen the world, as a sacred geography centered on the Mēru mountain (Sumēru). These ideas spread through Buddhism.

The division of the geography is remarkably similar across a *vast* trove of Hindu and Buddhist literature. What’s more: this geography is attested repeatedly by direct physical observation of travelers on the Buddhist pilgrimage circuit, most notably Xuan Zhang (Hiuen Tsang).

Due to thriving and well connected trade routes, as well as mastery in astronomical observations and calculus, Asian civilizations had been *far ahead* of Europe in the field of geography. But simplistic European (Greek) divisions of geography are being imposed to this day.

This doesn’t make any sense. “Asia” is a gigantic geographical mass. That mass of Asia is absurdly and quixotically cut from Europe, whose divisions are entirely based on “convention” (that is no geological or geographical sense). See the random borders between Eurasia.

Most elite Indians (primarily savarna white collar urban english medium educated folks like me) land on Western shores convinced that we are just as advanced and developed as these countries as a people. It's just "corruption" in India holding us back. Then reality hits. /1

We see that the West works better on a daily level, but not because of some mythical genetic or societal immunity to this mythical "corruption" villain. Cos there is corruption in Western politics too. They seem to have institutions and systems built over ages to minimize it.

But most Indians who reach these shores are engineer/mba/doctor types. Trained in secondary vocational type disciplines. So our default approach is to find a quick engineering type solution. We have almost zero exposure to sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, etc.

I remember being like that. Engineer-MBA who thought that because my vocabulary and exposition skills were above average and my quant skills were above average, I deserve a seat at the table on any discussion. Be it climate change, public health, efficacy of vaccines, etc.

For anything, I thought I knew the best. Why was this Obama fellow not trying my absolutely brilliant healthcare reform plan that I have posted on a blog with nice tables and graphs and references to IIT and IIM slang? Does he not know I'm from an IIM? <1% acceptance rate!

It's done: The IT Rules, 2021, are officially in play. We cannot stress this enough - this fundamentally changes the Indian internet. Please RT this thread on the Rules and how they bring government control over digital media like never before.
https://t.co/S7K9wnIkvI
1/n

IT Rules affect social media, OTT, and news platforms. The latter 2 have been brought under the Rules for the first time. The Rules make platforms legally liable for not complying with government regulation, hence making user experience fall in line with the same.
2/n

Social media platforms with 50 lakh+ users will now be regulated as Significant Social Media Intermediaries (SSMIs) with different obligations than Social Media Intermediaries (SMIs). Government discretion in compliance can lead to discrimination which disempowers small SMIs.
3/n

SMIs are now more answerable to law enforcement, with lesser breathing space around compliance deadlines.

Content takedown after receiving orders: 36hrs
Providing info to law enforcement: 72hrs
Requests to remove sexual content: 24hrs
Redressal by grievance officers: 15 days
4/n

The data retention period for SMIs has been doubled to 6 months for investigative purposes. Data will be preserved even if accounts are deleted. We are challenging this in the Supreme Court because such data retention in the absence of a data protection law is dangerous.
5/n

People think Modi needs Punjab to win. He won without Punjab, not once, but twice, and what happens in the state does not impact his political prospects at all. Heck, he'd be long gone when Punjab runs out of ground water 15-20 years from now. Yet, he's taking the right call.

I was on the ground in Punjab in 2019, and what most Sikhs I interacted with told me was they would want BJP to play a greater role in the politics of the state. They narrated how they were sick of the Akalis, of the stagnant regime of the Captain, and they trusted Modi.

I was in Anandpur Sahib, the constituency that was won by @ManishTewari later. I interacted with a few folks, running shops of religious artefacts around the Anandpur Sahib, and most of them wanted more industry in the region. More industry, more jobs, more prosperity.

Yes, there are blessed families in terms of agriculture in the state but there are two extremes. The ones who are blessed, and the ones who are not. For the ones who aren't, there is a need for more infrastructure, more industry, more investments. The state has potential.

The new farm laws would have created a generation of agripreneurs, created the potential for cold-storage, formalised functioning of small farms, contract farming, and what not. The fertile lands of the state offered unlimited potential merely from an agricultural point of view.