Asmita Nandy

My first cross-border investigation! When we started out a year ago, we thought the film would be different only to realise 2024 would become the trickiest year to make a documentary on the donkey route. youtu.be/jdgvUiw5yXU?si… Looking forward to your feedback as always.

📢 It's been a busy week settling into my new role at Collective Newsroom, as Assistant Editor to @BBCSanjoyM for @bbcIndia YouTube. I'll now be thinking videos full-time with an absolutely brilliant team focused on growing BBC’s English YouTube channel in India. Let's go!

Let me explain exactly why your phone seems to read your thoughts, because the real answer is more invasive than telepathy. Every time you open a website or app, a real-time bidding auction fires in under 100 milliseconds. Your GPS coordinates, browsing history, device fingerprint, age, gender, income bracket, and hundreds of inferred interest categories get packaged into a “bid request” and broadcast to hundreds of companies simultaneously. One company wins the ad slot. All of them keep the data. This happens thousands of times per day per person. A 2018 New York Times investigation found 75 companies pulling precise location data from apps, with some users tracked up to 14,000 times in 24 hours. In 2012, a Target statistician identified 25 products that, purchased in combination, could predict a customer was pregnant and estimate her due date. A teenager’s father discovered she was pregnant because Target sent baby coupons to the house before she told anyone. That was one retailer. Store receipts only. Fourteen years ago. Now scale that. Your phone pings GPS while you sleep. Data brokers link your phone, laptop, and tablet through probabilistic matching of IP addresses, WiFi networks, and behavioral patterns without you ever logging in. The FTC caught two brokers in 2024 categorizing people by visits to reproductive health clinics, political protests, and religious services, then selling those profiles to law enforcement. The algorithm doesn’t hear your thoughts. It compares your behavioral fingerprint against millions of similar profiles and predicts your next interest before you’re consciously aware of it. It makes hundreds of predictions per day. You ignore the misses. The five hits feel like telepathy. You paid for the phone. You pay for the data plan. You generate the signal. And every time a page loads, your identity gets auctioned to the highest bidder before the content even renders. They called it “personalized advertising” because “real-time mass surveillance funded by the people being surveilled” doesn’t fit on a consent banner.

If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about this story for months. @HeraRizwan reported from 3 states. We obsessed over every detail. Google's AI, designed for phones, is now rationing food to pregnant women. Read. Get angry. Share boomlive.in/decode/ai-faci… @pulitzercenter

Where's the lie?

Sri Lanka increases fuel prices amid rising global energy costs 🚨 Ceypetco fuel prices will be increased from midnight today 😮 ⛽️Auto Diesel increased by Rs.22 to Rs.303 ⛽️Super Diesel by Rs.24 to Rs.353 ⛽️Petrol Octane 92 by Rs.24 to Rs.317 ⛽️ Octane 95 by Rs.25 to 365 ⛽️ Kerosene by Rs.13 to Rs.195

I don’t think you understand how catastrophic the oil refinery bombing in Tehran is. Burning petroleum releases sulfur and nitrogen oxides that mix with rain to form sulfuric and nitric acid, essentially turning rainfall toxic. When Saddam burned Kuwaiti oil wells in 1991, the fallout contributed to what became known as Gulf War Syndrome, with veterans developing chronic illness and cancer decades later. The difference now: this isn’t a desert battlefield, it’s a city of 10 million people, most of which women and children.

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I was SHOCKED to see full on wedding celebrations happening with loud DJ music so close to the jungles till midnight! So pathetic.

Rubio: “Iran is run by religious fanatics.” The White House right now:

Some basic dos and don’ts at restaurants. Never let them put a slice of lemon in your drink. The peel is probably full of pesticides. Never dig into the communal bowl of saunf at the end of a meal. You might as well have the germs injected intravenously. @seemagoswami at her best

A New York Times investigation indicates that it was a US strike on an Iranian school that killed 175 people, mostly children. nytimes.com/2026/03/05/wor…

BREAKING: Sri Lanka just made its most consequential geopolitical decision in a generation. It granted IRINS Bushehr permission to dock at Trincomalee. Understand what Trincomalee is. It is not a secondary port chosen for discretion. It is one of the finest deep-water natural harbors on earth. The British Empire considered it the most strategically vital naval anchorage in the entire Indian Ocean, second in Asia only to Singapore. During the Second World War, the Japanese bombed Trincomalee in April 1942 in the same raid that destroyed HMS Hermes. It is the port that any power wishing to project naval force across the Bay of Bengal and into the Indian Ocean wants access to. India has been quietly seeking closer strategic arrangements with Trincomalee for years. The United States uses the broader Sri Lankan maritime space as a transit zone. China has made significant infrastructure investments in Colombo Port. Sri Lanka is now allowing an Iranian Navy vessel to dock there, forty-eight hours after a US submarine sank another Iranian Navy vessel forty kilometers off Galle, in what American officials are calling the first torpedo kill since World War Two. The conditions attached to the approval are the tell. Passengers are to be evacuated and transferred to Colombo before the vessel proceeds to Trincomalee. The sequencing, crew off the ship, then ship into the harbor, is the signature of a government trying to perform a humanitarian act while minimizing the military profile of what it is hosting. Sri Lanka is attempting to receive the crew without receiving the warship. Whether that distinction survives American, Indian, and Israeli intelligence scrutiny is a separate question. The approval arrives after what the Sri Lankan Parliament described as an eleven-hour delay that preceded the sinking of IRIS Dena. The political pressure on Colombo to not repeat that outcome is now explicit and documented. Opposition MPs named the delay in Parliament. The Foreign Minister acknowledged the distress call timeline. Sri Lanka could not deny IRINS Bushehr without the denial being read, in Colombo and in Tehran and in every neutral capital watching this war, as a second contribution to the death of Iranian sailors. This decision will cost Sri Lanka something. Washington will not view the docking of an Iranian Navy vessel at Trincomalee during an active US military campaign against Iran as a neutral humanitarian act. It will be registered as a positioning decision regardless of how Colombo frames it. The question Sri Lanka’s government was weighing overnight was not whether to incur a cost. It was which cost was survivable. Forty-eight hours ago Sri Lanka was a bystander. Today it is a party. The Indian Ocean theater has its first neutral-state-turned-participant. It will not be the last. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

The US Department of Defense released video footage it says shows an Iranian warship being sunk by a US submarine off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, far from Iran, killing dozens of sailors and widening Washington's pursuit of the Iranian navy reut.rs/47d4onH

A Torpedo in India’s Backyard: Why the U.S. Strike Looks Like An Unfriendly Act The U.S. torpedoing of the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in India’s maritime backyard is more than a battlefield event; it is a strategic embarrassment for New Delhi. The ship had just participated in India’s flagship MILAN-2026 naval exercise, where, along with 18 other foreign warships, it sailed as a diplomatic guest of the Indian Navy. By sinking a vessel returning from an Indian-hosted multilateral exercise, Washington effectively turned India’s maritime neighborhood into a war zone, raising uncomfortable questions about India’s authority in its own backyard. In diplomatic terms, the strike violated the unwritten code of naval hospitality. Attacking a ship immediately after it leaves a host’s waters is widely seen as a slight to that host. The message to participating navies is stark: attending India’s exercises may not guarantee safety once they sail away. The implications go deeper. Prime Minister Modi’s MAHASAGAR vision — positioning India as the Indian Ocean’s “preferred security partner” — rests on the idea that New Delhi can convene cooperation and maintain stability in the region. The U.S. strike shattered that image by demonstrating that a distant power can employ lethal force in India’s maritime backyard without coordination. Worse, the attack occurred near Sri Lanka, just south of India’s maritime boundary, precisely the space India hopes to keep insulated from Middle Eastern wars. Instead, the Indian Ocean suddenly looks like an extension of that conflict. The result is a jarring paradox: Washington may see the torpedoing as legitimate wartime action against an enemy vessel, but from New Delhi’s vantage point it was an unfriendly act — one that undermined India’s diplomacy, its convening power and its claim to regional maritime leadership. In one torpedo strike, American hard power has punctured India’s carefully cultivated soft power.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, the BBC understands bbc.in/3OQ7BmL

Exclusive: Modi Govt gave Rs 63 lakh for Sanatan Sanstha event that called for Hindu Rashtra, removing 25% of Indian Muslims Taxpayers' money is being used to fund hate thequint.com/news/politics/…

Two separate annual functions for Hindu and Muslim students in a #Indore school. "Mazhab nahi sikhata aapas mein bair karna,Hindi hain hum, watan hai Hindostan hamara." Many citizens of this country have sung these lines at least once during their school days. But in Indore, a school has turned this very idea on its head. In a shocking display of segregation, the institution reportedly chose to conduct separate annual functions for Hindu and Muslim students, dividing children along religious lines in what should have been a shared celebration. newslaundry.com/2026/02/10/ind…

25 Indians died today in coal mine but it’s not a big news for India.. they all are busy covering Narendra Modi’s pariksha pe charcha. It’s not even big news on Indian social media.

One of the saddest stories I've read in a while. What irony! indianexpress.com/article/cities…