He/him | Langley Fellow @PittDietrich | I study lensed galaxies with space telescopes | ex@astrobites @UChicago @cambridge_astro @iitdelhi (personal account)

Joined January 2012
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Pinned Tweet
I'm always late on Twitter and it's been a tiring month, but I'm going to cherish this for a bit: Michael Florian (U.Arizona) and I will co-lead a 70-hour Cycle 2 JWST program to study the building blocks of galaxies: star forming regions magnified due to gravitational lensing!!
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Murdered in a cafe by a flying robot.
🚨 BREAKING : Khalil Jamil Al-Masri has died from the injuries he sustained after being shot by an Israeli quadcopter drone while sitting at a cafe in Gaza.
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Dr Walter Rodney was assassinated on June 13, 1980, by a bomb planted in a walkie talkie. He was 38. His key work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, exposed the roots of global inequality and the violence of colonial underdevelopment.
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
FIFA is pathetic for just allowing things like this to happen like its nothing
🚨 OFFICIAL: There will be no Senegalese supporters at the World Cup due to visa issues. ⛔️🇸🇳
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
There you have it. Anthropic's CEO said it: The murder of more than 100 schoolgirls in Minab targeted by Anthropic's CLAUDE "is a use case that doesn't even violate our red lines." Time to rise up against these technofeudal war criminals.
CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei awkwardly smiles through his answer to a question about why Claude AI directly contributed to the US Military bombing of the elementary school in Minab.
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Jun 12
Seven hours. All children.
Jun 12
Cardinal Zuppi read the names of every child who passed away in Gaza. It took him 7 hours.
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Absolutely NO evidence of this by the way. Never been flagged up in any other country he’s attended. They’ve seen that it was a PR disasterclass, they’re desperate to save face now. Throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. Lowest of the low behaviour on show here.
Jun 10
The Trump administration said the United States had denied Somali soccer referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan entry for the World Cup because of his links to ‘suspected members of terror organizations’ reut.rs/4uVGHKs
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
What a weird way of saying ISRAEL KILLED Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil.
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
the sooner you recognize that ICE is just a glorified human trafficking operation the better
ICE agent busted for s*x trafficking
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Ya because they aren’t building them near wealthy neighborhoods
New study finds working class neighborhoods oppose data center at 5x the rate of wealthy neighborhoods Via Blood in the Machine
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Never has a crime so obscene been so confessed to, so endlessly, so shamelessly, so proudly
F*ck around and find out
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they've built concentration camps and i'm expected to act like it's a mere difference of political opinion
🚨 ICE announces it will no longer report deaths of recently released detainees. This comes after the deaths of recently released detainees surge to a two-decade high.
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
he’s actually Hitler but people don’t care since his crimes aren’t against white people
Israel announced they’re widening their invasion of Southern Lebanon Netanyahu has referred to it as the expansion of the “existing security strip.”
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
This is what a holocaust looks like.
One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death. Gaza in 2023 and 2026!
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The way we stopped hearing or seeing media about Lebanon and Palestine, and there are new types of bombs being dropped in a ceasefire
ISRAEL BOMBS LEBANON DESPITE IRAN WARNINGS
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Do you notice a stark difference after 2014? Earlier, for any scam, Manmohan Singh was targeted. This was a sign of healthy democracy. The buck stops with the Prime Minister. But now PM Modi is untouched by NEET & CBSE mess. People are questioning Education Minister, but not him.
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All this in just 4 years. Remember when they insisted it was impossible to build green infrastructure quickly enough
🚨: Erin Brockovich launches a map tracking AI data centers, and she's asking Americans for help
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
Correction. Blinkit didn't create 1,85,000 jobs. It created 1,85,000 people who own their own vehicles, pay for their own fuel, have no fixed salary, no PF, no ESI, no sick leave, no job security and are one algorithm update away from losing their entire income. These men work 12-14 hours a day across three apps simultaneously just to clear twenty thousand a month. No company bears the cost of their health, their accident, their family. They are not employees but infrastructure. Invisible, replaceable and deliberately kept contractor coded so the balance sheet stays clean. The 'jobs created' number is a marketing figure. It counts every delivery partner who ever downloaded the app. It does not count how many quit. How many were injured with zero compensation. How many are still waiting for their incentive payout. And yes this entire ecosystem exists because people are too comfortable to walk to a market. That comfort is being subsidized by men who cannot afford the same comfort themselves. And I don't give a shit about kunal kamra or raghav chaddha. First learn the difference between a job and a gig before you make a PowerPoint about it.
Number of Jobs created by Blinkit : 1,85,000 Number of Jobs created by Zepto : 1,20,000 Number of Jobs created by Big Basket :80000 Number of Jobs created by Zomato : 5,50,000 Number of Jobs created by Swiggy : 6,90,000 Number of Jobs created by Urban Company : 40000 Number of Jobs created by OLA : 1 million Number of Jobs created by Uber : 1.4 Million Number of Jobs created by Rapido : 8,00,000 The left social media warrior achievements are here take a look No of jobs created by Kunal Kamra : 0 No of Jobs created by Raghav Chadda : 0 No of Jobs created by Ravish Kumar : 0 People who have created 0 jobs are questioning people who have created million of Jobs in India.
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
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. :)
CBSE has systematically rewritten its rulebook to favor Coempt Eduteck. check out the blog.
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A 17-year old having more courage, skills, and love for the nation than many big news corporations and their multiple award winning journos combined.
May 30
#WATCH | Ranchi, Jharkhand | A class 12th student, Sarthak Sidhant, says, “…I have written a blog that compares the tender documents of CBSE. I have uploaded and published it… There were at least 15 discrepancies, as per my blog. I would like to highlight three or four of them. Let me give a background about Coempt. It was known as Globarena, and they have a very shady background. 23 students killed themselves because of coempt… Now, I would like to tell you about RFP (Request for Proposal). What happens is the government issues a tender and asks the bidder to bid for it. CBSE issued this tender three times… I have compared the old RFP and the new RFP, and I found some discrepancies… The first discrepancy is that there were three clauses of poor performances which was completely wiped out from the new RFP. In the earlier RFP, there was a clause called blacklisted earlier, whereas in the new RFP, it was changed to blacklisted currently. Why would the board want a service provider which was blacklisted earlier? The third thing I found out is the 50 crore limit, which you needed to qualify, and coempt qualified that by 1.7% … The time frame of corrupt practices was halved, and there were project criteria changes… It shows a pattern that the industry giant TCS was not preferred, but coempt was preferred, which works as a very fragmented group of institutions…”
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Gourav Khullar retweeted
this should hurt to look at. this should make you feel sick. this is one of the worst tragedies in human history and you can see it from space.
Gaza ( 2023-2024)🇵🇸
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