Newsletter: India Inside Out || Non-Resident Managing Editor: @CASIPenn || Previously: @scroll_in

Brussels, Belgium
Joined May 2007
Mekhala Krishnamurthy arrived at Penn fresh from fieldwork in Harda. In the library, she found that the Indologist William N Brown had spent his early years in Harda too, a century prior: My conversation with @CASIPenn's first postdoc:
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
It seems like the idea is to heckle or disrupt but it’s actually scene-setting for Republic TV to boldly take on Neha — with her audio down, you’ll only hear ‘brave reporter’ Harsh’s manufactured confrontation. Watch how it played on primetime today, it’s Arnab’s studio formula taken to the streets: accuse, mute the person you’re accusing, and go wild attributing criminal motives to them. Exactly what happened in the JNU sedition case, Bhima Koregaon, Shaheen Bagh, Farmer’s protest, endless lists…
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I work for a newsletter company, so biased, but it’s vital to separate email as entertainment, email as productivity, & email as info into separate buckets. Last two much more deeply impacted by agents if agents take off; the former thrives because it’s inherently human and fun.
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call: the newsletter is dead @every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly. persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to. i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it. this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered. what it means It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to. luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new. we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent) it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc. to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over. here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
Interesting diary item on Ashwin Vaishnaw - too many unanswered questions.
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A must-read report by Zaen Alkazi He traces large-scale revolt of over 2 lakh Indian contract workers in 2026, tracing how they spread strikes across northern India, on social media, marching factory to factory, networks built over years of migration archive.is/20261001100945/ht…
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
Few things to note: Delhi Police still hasn’t returned phones of people detained. The brunt of the protest is falling on the ground staff working gruelling shifts, executing a strategy with no clear endgame. And the intimidation isn’t quite working: “police ki maar ka bura nahin maante”, says a cop. By the end, protestors are pretty much scolding them to let them go
Anyone who gets detained will come out with serious doubts on whether @DelhiPolice's attempts at initimidation are working. My report from inside the now-infamous community centre at Pandwalan Khurd. newslaundry.com/2026/10/14/w…. cc: @svaradarajan, @Jayati1609, @Aakar__Patel.
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The million-dollar question. Are the efforts by @BJP4India and @delhipolice to intimidate Indians working? If the detention centre at Pandwalan Khurd is anything to go by, nope, nada, nahin. (And, trust me on this. I was in there).
Beatings, seized phones, and detentions on the outskirts of Delhi. Read @mrajshekhar's chilling eyewitness account of a crackdown that appears to be fuelling the anger it seeks to contain. newslaundry.com/2026/10/14/w…
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
Civil litigation is something of a black box in terms of data analysis - we know so little about how many civil cases there are and around what, as compared to the criminal side. Our work using e-courts data attempts to bring numbers to the table.
The full extent of people's interactions with the law in India can be difficult to quantify. We analysed cases disposed of across India’s subordinate courts between 2010 and 2020. These cases, heard before magistrates, civil judges, and district and sessions judges, are the first point of contact between Indians and the legal system. In all, this dataset contains 43 million records of legislation invoked in cases. While criminal cases contribute to the majority of the dataset, the data also provides valuable insights into civil litigation, which is otherwise rarely captured in Indian data. Civil statutes define people’s rights and obligations in personal or contractual relationships, and provide remedies when disputes arise. The top five civil statutes invoked in the ten-year period were the civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, the Registration of Births and Deaths Act of 1969, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005, and the Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996. The civil provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act are the most commonly invoked, with 1.75 million records. They cover claims over loss of life or property, vehicle damage and insurance liability. Section 166, which allows people to seek compensation after an accident, was cited 1.25 million times. The Hindu Marriage Act follows with 1.34 million records. It covers marriage, divorce and separation among Hindus, with contested divorce cited most often, followed by divorce by mutual consent. #CriminalLaw #Legal #Law #India #DataForIndia
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Read @mrajshekhar's piece on the abuse he saw when Delhi police detained him and others arbitrarily. The piece answers an important question about the government's intimidation tactics. They aren't working, and may even be counterproductive. newslaundry.com/2026/10/14/w…
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
More evidence, if needed, of what #SIR is really about. Detailed analysis today by @vrsrini and co author in today’s @the_hindu And no reply from the @ECISVEEP to this.
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🚨 New series! 🚨 For India in Transition, from @CASIPenn, we have a series in collaboration with @Himalayas_SNU and @jabinjacobt. In the first piece, Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia looks at lithic histories between the Sikkim Himalayas and Naga Hills casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/kalza…
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In the midst of our campaign to raise Rs. 30 lakhs by 15 November, to cover half of our annual budget, we wanted to thank you for your past donations that let us publish these smash hits over the past two years (thread below). Donate now to keep us going: the-india-forum.danamojo.org…
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
At least 16 journalists were brutally detained while covering public demonstrations in #India. In addition to the four journalists already mentioned, RSF has learned that Anushka Bhardwaj (#BusinessStandard), Hritik Joshi and Rahul Charas (@NavbharatTimes), Shoaib Daniyal (#Scroll), Anshu (@newslaundry ), Saurabh Sharma (@Reuters ), Jagriti Trisha (BOOM), Shivang Shukla (Mo), Neeraj Jha (@moliticsindia), and freelance journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta were also forcibly detained in #Delhi, along with Kinjal (@AltNews) in #Ahmedabad and Divya Aslesha (Scroll) in #Pune. Covering events of public interest is not a crime. It is their job. The police's actions against the press are unacceptable.
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SOS messages coming in from Pandwala Khurd where the Delhi Police dumped a bunch of protestors after allegedly assaulting some of them quite badly. Now a mob of goons has gathered outside the community centre they were left at. There is no medical treatment for the injured kids, no transport and no security from the menacing crowd that has obviously been allowed to gather to “teach a lesson” to the protestors. @AmitShah and @DelhiPolice this is on you.
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
Some of the buses Delhi Police is using to detain those protesting against the chief election commissioner are marked ‘election duty’. @thewire_in
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We are a tiny newsroom. Three of our colleagues got detained today — for doing their jobs. Support us. @scroll_in scroll.in/contribute
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
Independent journalists become an easy target - as one journalist tried to stop another from being picked up, this is what happened…
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Widespread detention and ill treatment of journalists
This is how Delhi Police is treating journalists. Even those who have press badges on them. Hear the account of the journalist in the next tweet.
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Rohan Venkat retweeted
“What’s my offence? Why are you detaining me?” My colleague @ShoaibDaniyal was simply standing on the road in a South Delhi locality, waiting for a taxi, when he was picked up by Delhi Police.
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