Panchali

Kafka, once again, rescuing me from myself.

@swatiatrest @ajayrotti @ReutersAsia Our university - a private elite one - has started serving curd rice for lunch and dinner because of the unavailability of commercial gas.

@ajayrotti @ReutersAsia School kids got only eggs today in parts of Kolkata due to a lack of supply of commercial gas. You may hide behind pedantry by saying I didn't say ALL but you are just obfuscating.

Kitchens across India???? I had hot breakfast today and will have hot lunch too. Have some shame @ReutersAsia

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/10.10… youtu.be/c5qRkeVxc7E?si… 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.

America never disappoints.

Gig workers’ unions forcing the government to put an end to 10 minute delivery, and ending the corporate promise of ten minute deliveries, is truly one of the most significant victories for organised labour union in Indian history.

What happened today is a lesson for the Opposition. #MamataBanerjee stood alone, fought back, and exposed BJP’s pre-poll undemocratic drama. Her actions spoke louder than words. ED–CBI’s record is known: no raids on BJP, no questions on their massive fund rise. Pure vendetta politics. Others should learn and BJP must not mess with @MamataOfficial Didi. Thanks to @ravish_journo Sir for speaking the truth.

When Bengal's iconic Kirtan caught Jesus's message 🧵🎄 If you visit Nadia on a winter morning, then you would probably come across a band of singers singing kirtan across the roads, but not of Lord Krishna or Chaitanya Dev, rather addressed to Jesus Christ !

@amitangshu I am dming you my number/let's speak.

@PanchaliRay3 Oh no! Leaving on the 26th! We must connect. I have stuff to talk to you about.

Each homecoming in #Kolkata is marked by my father gifting me a book. This time, it is Gramsci in India, a fascinating collection of essays exploring Indian intellectual engagement with Gramsci from the late 1960s.

@sampurnahere many congratulations ! I am looking forward to reading this one as well.

🚨 New publication 🚨 What does “flood” mean? In chars floods are both everyday processes and episodes controlled by state. It unpacks coexisting and colliding temporalities and critiques “episodic” narrative. #Floods #RiverIslands #PoliticalEcology tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

CFP | #EASA2026 (21–24 July, Poland)
Living with Rivers We welcome papers on rivers, ecologies, politics & fluvial worlds. 
🔗 Panel 114: easaonline.org/easa-conferenc… #EASA2026 #CallForPapers #AnthroTwitter #PoliticalEcology #MoreThanHuman #RiverStudies #Hydrosocial

After more than five years of unjust incarceration as an undertrial in the Bhima Koregaon case, activist Jyoti Jagtap walked free from jail on interim bail.