film maker author journalist. full-time procrastinator. writes books, on ISRO women scientists, latest one FATEH (first fiction book), makes docu films.
mumbai
Joined April 2015
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My first fiction book Fateh is now online. Paperback version on amazon soon as well. Please read, comment, share.
FATEH amazon.in/dp/B0B6HSLNYX/ref=…
Minnie Vaid retweeted
“True freedom will be the day when those who demand their rights won't be crucified. Those who are fighting for people's rights are being held up as anti-nationals, victims are being punished for crimes against them...”
#ShantaGokhale on #IndependenceDay
Minnie Vaid retweeted
Tarun Tejpal was convicted for sexual assault by the Bombay High Court today, 13 years after he was first accused and later acquitted by a lower court. The HC overturned the judgement today.
I was with Indian Express when the story broke and the sickest development in the entire story was when his "team" sent pictures of the survivor to the news media, showing her smiling and "behaving normally" after undergoing the assault in the elevator during an event.
No one understands what it takes for a survivor to believe what just happened and process the enormity of it, and every abuser weaponises the "why was she acting normal" narrative to divert attention from their own filthy deeds.
Only a survivor knows what it is like to be torn apart by a thousand thoughts as a time while struggling to keep it all inside, because we, as a society, have made this world absolutely unsafe for a victim to open their mouth.
Minnie Vaid retweeted
We at @NWM_India have always demanded punishment for Tejpal. In 2021, this document was put together to critique the appalling and sexist judgment that acquitted him
nwmindia.org/initiatives/the…
Minnie Vaid retweeted
As a storyteller, I have immense respect for @newslaundry, especially their body of work on content analysis, media reviews & investigative stuff.
Here, a rare case of lazy journalism.
You don’t invite guest speaker having conflict of interest to defend war crimes.
Not done!
This quoted post is unavailable.
Minnie Vaid retweeted
WATCH: Chatur Ramalingam of 3 Idiots aka Omi Vaidya comes out in support of Sonam Wangchuk who’s been on hunger strike for over 15 days now!
So done with @newslaundry
And unfollow
Host welcomes Hartosh Bal, recites "Tunak Tunak Tun."
The stereotype is the first problem. The silence that followed from everyone in that room including guest speaker is the second. That silence is as much the problem as the joke.
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Minnie Vaid retweeted
My dear folks at @newslaundry,
The next time you discuss screenwriting and the craft of filmmaking, and what you can technically call propoganda.
Please have someone on the panel who has actually written one.
If nothing else, to explain how a screenplay works. It is a specialized craft.
Watching films, even critiquing them well, does not make one a screenwriter or a director.
I say this because I believe the point of shows like yours is to get closer to the truth, not to showcase one man's opinion.
Thanks.
Is Satluj a "well-made" movie or "propaganda" for a political cause?
@MnshaP, @AbhinandanSekhr, @Shardool_, joined by @HartoshSinghBal critique the portrayal of Jaswant Singh Khalra and the danger of distorting historical facts.
Tune into NL Hafta: newslaundry.com/2026/07/11/h…
Minnie Vaid retweeted
They call this the ‘road to heaven.’
Looking at that horizon, I can see why.
I haven't been there yet, but I can already feel the silence.
A reminder that while we are blessed with friends and family to cheer us on, the most important journeys are the ones we take within ourselves.
We all eventually have to find our own road.
#SundayWanderer
Minnie Vaid retweeted
Archvies | Over the past few years, the Indian diaspora has become political—while keeping a safe distance from the storm centre of the toxic right-wing politics it spews—and Priyanka Chopra is simply the high priestess of the blinding bourgeois hypocrisy it has come to typify. Like Chopra, the larger community of Indian immigrants to the United States and the United Kingdom have been in the news for what they choose to endorse and ignore. Indian-Americans in New Jersey recently apologised after including a bulldozer—now a symbol of anti-Muslim hate—in a parade to celebrate 75 years of Indian independence. The New York Times noted that, “to those who understood its symbolism, it was a blunt and sinister taunt later likened to a noose or a burning cross at a Ku Klux Klan rally.”
In September 2022, the diaspora in Leicester and Birmingham went on an angry march, threatening Muslim residents in the area. Wherever the diaspora is concentrated, it is now flexing its muscles to threaten South Asian Muslims. The seeds of hate sown in India have spread like a metastasising cancer, infecting all corners of the world where Indians live.
The real grift, for me, is that Chopra—like the rest of the diaspora—keeps getting away with her delusional self-narrative. As a UN ambassador, she has stood up for everyone from George Floyd to Iranian women while inviting Modi to her wedding reception. She is by no means the only actor with a broken moral compass; Bollywood’s role as a propaganda machine for the Hindu Right recently made it to the New Yorker. But she is among the few who live in a dual reality, code-switching from propagandist to civil-rights champion more easily than one slips in and out of pyjamas.
Read Vidya Krishnan's essay on how the hypocrisy of the Indian diaspora is overwhelming: caravanmagazine.in/communiti…
Minnie Vaid retweeted
To those who were defending Hardik's behaviour, watch this video.
He not only hogged the trophy in the stadium, where players like Dube and Rinku did not even get a chance to hold the trophy.
But this self-obsessed cringe “auraman” did not leave the trophy even in the bus. 🤢
Minnie Vaid retweeted
We need prominent signs at all airports (and announcements in flights) about NOT USING MOBILE PHONES IN SPEAKER MODE (for calls, watching videos, etc.) in waiting areas, in planes... basically in any public area.
cc @DGCAIndia @MoCA_GoI @mohol_murlidhar @RamMNK
Need a public campaign for this
....should be extended for all public transit (railways and bus too).
Minnie Vaid retweeted
Just witnessed this clip.
Nas can be set aside; his Zionist position is already known and requires no further dissection. He is a known but common evil.
What truly demands reckoning are Nikhil Kamat and Tanmay Bhat, living exhibits of everything that is rotting at the core of contemporary Indian public discourse.
These are men who have been handed enormous platforms, cultural capital, and the ear of millions, yet remain staggeringly, almost comically unlettered.
Their influence is not merely harmless celebrity; it is actively corrosive. They wield the power of mass communication with the unearned confidence of those who have never once been intellectually challenged in their own circles.
This is Dunning-Kruger effect in its purest, most grotesque form: men so profoundly ignorant, so Jahil, that they lack even the self-awareness to suspect their ignorance.
They speak with the swagger of Jawaharlal Nehru, but their thoughts are as shallow as a WhatsApp forward.
Worse still, they have created for themselves a esoteric little ecosystem, a mutual-admiration sauna where they all soak together, marinating in the same shallow certainties, reinforcing one another’s blind spots until their shared mediocrity begins to feel like wisdom.
In that echo chamber, ignorance does not merely survive; it becomes doctrine.
And that is the real tragedy. India, in 2026, finds itself in a strange and humiliating intellectual dark age, not because the country lacks brilliant minds, but because the loudest, richest, and most visible ones are precisely the ones least equipped to carry the decent conversation.
A single serious intellectual pushback, a solitary honest question asked with precision, would reduce these paper-tiger pundits to dust.
Yet no one in their orbit ever delivers it.
This is not comedy. This is a civilisational decline wearing a thick dark hoodie in deep Bombay summers, casually planning the next exotic holiday, asking whether you’ve tried that dish yet, peddling twenty-day weight-loss miracles, and cracking jokes while an entire nation quietly forgets how to think.
Minnie Vaid retweeted
More on this
How H.K. Dua stopped the managers of the @timesofindia from running a column by Harshad Mehta, in the very newspaper where Sucheta Dalal had exposed his scam, in 1998-99. The column eventually ended up in 'Navbharat Times'.
From 'The Scam' by Debashis Basu and Sucheta Dalal.👇🏾
Minnie Vaid retweeted
Know what I hate? Counting calories.
Sure, it works, but it’s a pain in the ass.
Here’s the exact system I’d use to drop 30 lbs of stubborn fat (WITHOUT counting calories):
1. STOP eating 3 hours before bed and…
Minnie Vaid retweeted
Stop digitising the menu at restaurants. It really isn't convenience to scan the QR and then verify through OTP before ordering just for the waiter to get back and reconfirm what we've just ordered.
Want to give us a real digital experience? Show us how our food is prepared or let us 'call the chef' for any specific instructions.
Pathetic experience in most restaurants now.
Minnie Vaid retweeted
A 1 crore earning techie's life has no value in Bengaluru.
And if you're not earning that much? Your life has even less.
My sister and her friend were driving home in my car. They stopped at a red light - the logical thing anyone does. A drunk driver in a mini-truck didn't feel the need to stop. He slammed into them instead.
I know he was drunk. She knows it. The highway police knows it. The truck owner knows it.
No arrest was made.
The truck driver never showed up at the station. The owner never showed up. Nobody cared. My sister and her friend - both injured, both terrified - kept going back to the station, back to the accident site, explaining what happened over and over, just trying to get a report filed.
I was in the US. All I could do was talk to them on calls, helpless.
Here's what the police told them:
"If nobody died, an FIR doesn't make sense."
"Just claim first party insurance."
"Third party insurance doesn't pay much anyway."
And then, quietly, one officer pulled them aside and told the truth: "These truck mafia bribe us. Nothing will happen."
Nothing happened.
The truck was KA04 AE6550. The police themselves said if they'd been on a two-wheeler, both would be dead.
We had 100% insurance from Reliance. Claim rejected. Reason? "Misrepresentation of facts." These two, even while injured, kept showing up to represent the facts. Reliance still found a way to deny them.
The law says if someone hits you from behind, the person behind is at fault. It was a red light. How does a truck driver not see that?
Trust me, this isn't about money. I'll manage the repairs and the medical bills. I have savings. And I have a decent credit score; I'll take a personal loan if I have to. That's not the point.
The point is this: my sister is afraid now. Afraid that anything can happen to her at any moment and there's no one - no system, no law, no institution - that will protect her.
But how do I tell her the world is supposed to be fair? How do I tell her to trust the system? How do I explain that the drunk driver walks free, the truck owner was never questioned, and the police pocketed their bribe and closed the file?
I can't say to any official, "What if this was your daughter? Your sister?" Because their daughters travel in cars with security escorts. They will never know what it feels like to be ordinary and unprotected.
So I'm saying it to you, an ordinary reader.
You're on the road. You stop at a red light. A drunk driver in a truck rear-ends your car. Your loved one is inside, terrified.
And then you learn: there is no recourse. None.
The truck owner pays off the cops. The insurance company rejects your claim. The system shrugs.
This is Bengaluru in 2025. This is India in 2025. This is what your life is worth here.
One more thing. The friend in the car? He's one of the smartest people I know. close to top 100 rank in IIT-JEE. AI engineer and one of the biggest data companies. At 23, he is valuable to be paid more annually than the cost of five such trucks, that too, in India. He's patriotic. He pays his taxes. He stays in India even though he constantly gets offers to move to the US.
This is the confidence our system gives to someone who is clearly an asset to this country. All this unfairness - for a drunk truck driver.
@blrcitytraffic @BlrCityPolice - tell me. I've always avoided raising fingers publicly. But what else can I do?
Total commercialisation of a private clubhouse at #NaharAmritShakti owned by @sukhrajnahar where pool is given out for weddings and the club for shooting ad films! Just deplorable. @NectarfieldClub