Rajat Upadhyaya

Was wondering why it's using Kannada letters for GBA & then it hit me - while we keep clamouring for Kannada, why is it called Greater Bengaluru Authority? BBMP was completely in Kannada. Could've gone with Bruhat Bengaluru Pradhikara (clashes with Bannerughatta Biological Park)

Pavilion end names at Chinnaswamy, Bengaluru: Anil Kumble End Rahul Dravid End Meanwhile End names at Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad: Jio End Adani End No further comments needed.

Think 🤔…

There is something seriously wrong if a body charged with regulating food goes to the police to file FIRs against those who question its performance. What is the FSSAI really regulating? Food? Or people who question it? Deeply disturbing theprint.in/feature/fir-co… via @theprintindia

Big Breaking: Authorities accidentally ban PM’s account after old tweets oh him criticising the government resurface.

When Mahamahim madam travels to Bengal & if CM is not there to join her, it’s an insult of highest office, entire tribal community & also of constitution! But when Mahamahim madam travels to Bihar, it’s ok if CM or even DyCM don’t show up because she is very humble and modest🙏

Now after that KitKat heist has worked we found the perfect transport for the Toblerone heist

April fools is not part of our culture. It is a western concept. In India we have Achhe Din

This is an Orwellian nightmare. Basically he is saying that the state will now photograph your car and debit your bank account directly. No court order, no notice, no consent, no due process. Just a camera, an algorithm, and instant access to your money. And millions of people will clap for this because muh "technology" and "no more queues." Every wrongful deduction, every misread plate, every system error will drain your money first and maybe, if you're lucky, get reversed months later after you run around in circles with government authorities and court cases. But alas, those of us who call this out will be labelled aunty nashnul luddites.

👏 IPL tickets and the hypocrisy over ‘freebies’ deccanherald.com/opinion/ipl-ti…

Had the Karnataka MLAs spent time in the Vidhana Soudha discussing safety and security preparedness for IPL fans, it would have upheld the dignity of the House. Instead, we saw MLAs pleading and even threatening for free tickets for themselves and their families. This is not just poor priority. It exposes a deeper problem - a VIP mindset that sees public office as entitlement. Why should any sports body owe MLAs anything? Why should elected representatives expect privileges denied to ordinary citizens? Public office is not a privilege. It is a responsibility. This culture must end. #IPLTicket #MLAIPLKarnataka

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

India's External Affairs Minister, at an official all-party meeting, used the word 'dalal' to describe Pakistan's diplomatic role. Not in a chai dhaba. Not on a WhatsApp forward. At a formal government briefing. This is what a decade of BJP rule has produced: a Foreign Minister who reaches for street-level abuse when confronted with the reality that Pakistan is hosting the most consequential peace talks on the planet and India has no seat, no role, and nothing to offer except name-calling. The dignity of Indian diplomacy died somewhere between this briefing and that word.

I was applying for Australian citizenship and the interviewer asked, "Do you have a criminal record?" I said, "No. Is that still required?"

Modi Ji, In COVID, you gave 4.33 crore migrants 4 hours to figure out their lives. They walked. Hundreds of kilometres. Barefoot. On highways. On railway tracks. And when Parliament asked how many died? The government said it kept no record. No record. Of the dead. 96% got zero rations. Zero wages. While India clapped on balconies and lit diyas on your command. You held Bengal rallies and blessed Kumbh crowds during the second wave. Hospitals had no oxygen. Bodies floated in rivers. You called it India’s “vaccine maitri” moment and exported doses abroad. PM CARES: ₹10,000+ crore collected. RTI? Refused. CAG audit? Blocked. Public accounts? Never published. The fund that “cares”, answers to no one. Fast forward to 2026. Six years in power. Zero strategic LPG reserves built. 90% import dependency. One strait. No backup plan. 33 crore families can’t cook a hot meal. Your government’s response? Critics are “panic creators.” COVID = “Clap and light diyas.” LPG crisis = “Stay united like COVID.” Sir, the pattern IS the policy. You don’t manage crises. You manage the narrative around them. And then you call that leadership.

He came. Delivered a generic speech. Warned everyone for tough times ahead. Spoke some facts we all know already. Allowed no questions at all. Had no cross-questioning on his own failed policies. Left. Won't speak again. You are now on your own. All the best. Re-live Covid.

Jim Hacker: Humphrey, we have to do something about Iran. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Prime Minister, the government is already doing a great deal. Jim Hacker: Such as? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Monitoring developments, coordinating with allies, reviewing contingency plans and expressing concern. Jim Hacker: That all sounds like nothing, Humphrey. Sir Humphrey Appleby: On the contrary, Prime Minister. In diplomacy it is vital to appear active without becoming involved. Jim Hacker: The Americans are bombing things, the Iranians are firing missiles, the Strait of Hormuz is practically closed and we’re… appearing active? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Precisely. Jim Hacker: Innocent people are dying, Humphrey! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, Prime Minister. That is why the Foreign Office is drafting a very strongly worded statement about it. Jim Hacker: A statement won’t stop a war. Sir Humphrey Appleby: No, Prime Minister, but it will ensure that we are on record as having been extremely concerned while it was happening. Bernard Woolley: If I may, Prime Minister — the Cabinet Office has identified six possible courses of action. Jim Hacker: Good! What are they? Bernard Woolley: We can condemn the escalation, call for restraint, urge negotiations, support our allies, assist defensive operations or participate directly. Jim Hacker: And what do they recommend? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Supporting our allies. Jim Hacker: That sounds suspiciously like participating. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Oh no, Prime Minister. Participating means fighting. Supporting merely means allowing others to fight from places that technically belong to us. Jim Hacker: Humphrey, if Iranian missiles hit one of our bases, we’ll be in the war anyway! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, Prime Minister, but we shall have entered it with the invaluable diplomatic advantage of being surprised. Bernard Woolley: It’s generally considered the safest way to enter a war, Prime Minister. Jim Hacker: How on earth can that be safe? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Because if the war goes badly, we can say we never meant to join it. And if it goes well, we can say we were there all along.

The good @mukulkesavan takes no prisoners, minces no words. Says it straight.

Brilliant, simply brilliant from @samzsays - the best thing you can read today.

From a post today by a leading Iranian sociologist Mohammad Fazeli, one of a group that signed an anti-war letter calling for maximum diplomacy and opposed the protest crackdown. Worth reading how opponents of war in Iran nevertheless view UK - not necessarily to agree, but to understand. “Every corner of London—especially in the central and old areas—bears statues of commanders, officers, and British soldiers who invaded other countries for centuries, killed, colonized, and protected Britain’s illegitimate interests in the target countries.   During one of my walks in that last week in central London, I came across a very large statue of soldiers and a memorial of the Royal Artillery. Under this large statue, something like this phrase was written: ‘In memory of the soldiers and martyrs of the Royal Artillery in Mesopotamia... Iran and...’ I don’t remember the rest exactly, but this part has stayed with me for nineteen years.   The British soldiers were invaders sent to advance Britain’s interests in other countries. Yet the Royal Artillery memorial called them martyrs—martyrs who fought thousands of kilometers away from England, in West Asia, in Mesopotamia, in Iran.   Colonialism calls its invading soldiers martyrs, builds memorials for them, and adorns its city with them. Colonialism normalizes sending British soldiers to West Asia and Iran. A hundred years after British colonialism, sending American soldiers, ships, and weapons to destroy Iran is portrayed as normal, humanitarian, and in the interest of international peace.   But it is not only that colonialism normalizes its presence thousands of kilometers away from its country; it also portrays the defense by the target countries as abnormal. The colonial discourse condemns defending the homeland—not directly, but through a thousand other tools. An Iranian soldier defending his country is called a terrorist, but the one who comes from thousands of kilometers away to invade, kill, destroy, and bring annihilation is portrayed as a messenger of freedom.”