Kafka, once again, rescuing me from myself.

Wow. So will Durga Puja this year also be off the roads?

Published in The Hindu: @sabirahamedgd and @Ashin_econ of Sabar Institute present an analysis of caste, religious and gender representation within the committees of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly #DataForBetterLives

As #Bengal votes, 9.1 million disenfranchised, many because of transliteration/clerical errors and names not matching before and after marriage From #Murshidabad, @PanchaliRay3 on what #SIR reveals about the fragility of documents as evidence of citizenship Link below 👇

Nearly 80, Shajana Bibi struggled across a dry, sandy riverbed to reach a panchayat office over a spelling error in her Aadhaar card As #Bengal votes, 9.1 million disenfranchised in the bureaucratic maze of voter rolls revision @PanchaliRay3’s #fieldnotes from Murshidabad Link👇

some notes to accompany what i wrote earlier- why increasingly Muslims and Dalits feel alienated from their own land. Field Notes: A Stranger In Her Own Land open.substack.com/pub/articl…

RT @MahuaMoitra: Respectfully want to tell Supreme Court all 19 appellate tribunals for SIR hearings housed in same building in Joka is CLO…

I write on the chaos unleashed by the SIR on Bengal. Returning to my field work in chars of Murshidabad and listening to the stories of anxiety, grief and disenfranchisement was truely heartbreaking. article-14.com/post/expense-…

62 million men visited & engaged on that rape website. A website that shows men how to drug & rape their own wives. 62 MILLION MEN GLOBALLY. 62 million men who are strangers to each other gathered on a website to learn how to rape women and get away with it.

As West Bengal’s SIR raises concerns over voter deletions, a five-person research team is tracking missing names booth by booth. The team combines economics, statistics, and computer science to parse a staggering maze of data. Kainat Sarfaraz reports. newslaundry.com/2026/04/12/w…

Jum Jum Jumla King | By: Crony M

Absolutely incredible chart from @AlJazeera. The United States is a nation addicted to war.

Let's keep the North India excitement out of South India.

Here is the stupendous @raogajraj playing Anil Kumar, who got his daughter Urvi back with pomp and fervour in Kanpur back in April 2024.. sometimes a 3 minute long campaign film is worth much more than GDP.. the nation’s true worth in its respect for wellbeing and not shame..

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild. 5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals. The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today. The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century. People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable. 60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

All signs of a government in crisis.

My two bits on my research in chars and borderlands in India. Drawing from my essay, "Alienated in one's own land"tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.… youtu.be/c5qRkeVxc7E?si=CMoH… via @YouTube

The censored toon. 👇🏾

I write on Gyanendra Pandey's book "Men at Home" and why men need to read more feminism before they decide to write on gender :)

IIT Madras Director to be conferred a Padma Bhushan for research on the anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties of cow urine. Where does science end and absurdity begin?

A more precise statement: All modern humans have an unbroken lineage of about 300,000 years going back to Africa. All Indians carry a genetic lineage going back about 60,000 years to the arrival of the Out of Africa migrants. All Indians also carry the genetic lineage of the people who would go on to build the Harappan Civilization, a mix of the Out of Africa migrants and later migrants from ancient Iran, going back to perhaps 7,000 years ago. Most Indian population groups also carry the genetic lineage of the Steppe migrations from Central Asia between 2000-1500 BCE that brought Indo-European languages to the subcontinent, as also the East Asian migrations that brought Austro-Asiatic languages after 2000 BCE. Yes, we do carry a long genetic lineage, one that goes far beyond 5000 years, as we are a mix of multiple migrations into India that happened in prehistory.