Technology. Power. Institutions. People. Observing how they shape each other Co-founder, Founding Fuel Columnist, Hindustan Times Co-author, The Aadhaar Effect
Joined January 2009
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Remarkable comments.
1. Condolences to the departed.
2. Advise the living to avoid crowded places.
3. Look at the future because Dussehra and Diwali are also coming.
Truly deep acknowledgement of grief, groundbreaking contribution to crowd safety, and hope for the future.
VIDEO | Raipur, Chhattisgarh: On Kolkata Durga Puja stampede, BJP MP Kangana Ranaut says, "Very tragic incident; I urge people to avoid going to overly crowded places."
(Full video available on PTI Videos - ptivideos.com)
The first time I wondered if AI may ever be conscious was when a researcher spoke to me of how “algorithms can be penalised”. This, so it learns better. It was very mathematical then. Much water was passed under the bridge since. (Thread👇 ) @rmnth @MoleShrivastava
Can AI be intelligent and still feel nothing?
My colleague @rmnth’s weekend special for @FoundingF provides a useful way into this question: seven thinkers who disagree about what consciousness is—and what it would take for a machine to have it.
A short thread 🧵
Charles Assisi retweeted
A billion people open Google Maps every month.
They type an address. They tap “Start.” They follow the blue line. They arrive. They close the app. That is the entire Google Maps experience for 90% of users a blue line between 2 points.
A delivery driver who’s spent 8 years navigating 14 hours a day on Google Maps told his friend something during a ride that made the friend pull over and open Settings.
“You use Google Maps like it’s 2014. The app you’re running has a 3D driving view that shows buildings, lane guidance, and traffic lights in real time and you’re following a flat blue line. It has augmented reality walking directions that overlay arrows on the actual street through your camera and you’re squinting at a 2D dot on a map. It can save your parking spot and guide you back to your car and you circle the lot for 10 minutes every time. It shows how crowded a restaurant is right now, in real time, before you drive there and you walk in, see a 45-minute wait, and leave. It works without internet for entire countries and you panic every time you lose signal. It compares rideshare prices across Uber and Lyft inside the app and you switch between 3 apps to find the cheapest ride. It has an incognito mode and every search, every route, every place you’ve visited is saved to your Google account permanently.”
He showed him 11 Google Maps features that transform the app from “a blue line” into the most powerful navigation, discovery, and safety tool on any phone.
Here’s every hidden Google Maps feature most users have never opened 🧵
The real achievement of a political leader is to have supporters who will defend everything he does. The real tragedy is when those supporters begin to believe that defending him is the same as thinking independently.
Charles Assisi retweeted
This was already expressed by Seneca who said that if you are trying to distinguish yourself with your strength, an ox will always be stronger than you. So work on being maximally human.
Charles Assisi retweeted
What would a lasting Tata settlement settle?
Whether Chandra stays and whether Tata Sons lists both matter. Either outcome leaves questions about who decides, how capital is used and how power is held accountable.
Satish Pradhan’s new essay on @FoundingF 🧵
Incredibly sophisticated scam here. Comes as a text message.
Your registered vehicle number is correct.
Tells you there’s a fine for a traffic violation.
Tried to spoof the mParivahan app with a link to pay.
Click on it and your device gets hijacked.
Or you end up getting scammed.
This is despite telcos (like @airtelindia) are working to flag this as scam.
People still get conned.
Glad that alerts from @MTPHereToHelp @IndianCERT are out in the public domain.
But more people must know.
Charles Assisi retweeted
In 2002 a woman living inside one of the most powerful religious organisations in north India wrote an anonymous letter.
She said the man at the top was raping his female followers.
Every big newspaper refused to print it. A man who ran a small evening paper in Sirsa printed it.
His name was Ram Chander Chhatrapati.
He was 53. His paper was called Poora Sach, which means the whole truth. It was a local Hindi evening daily, a few pages, in the same town as the headquarters of Dera Sacha Sauda.
The head of that Dera was Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. He had millions of followers. Politicians visited him before elections.
On 31st May 2002, Poora Sach published the letter.
The threats started almost immediately. He kept publishing.
On 23rd October 2002 he ran another report on the sexual exploitation of women at the Dera.
The next evening, 24th October, 2 men came to his house on a scooter and shot him 4 times from close range.
He died of his injuries on 21st November, in a hospital in Delhi. Most national newspapers barely noticed.
His son Anshul was a young man. He went to court and asked for the case to be taken away from the local police and given to the CBI. The High Court agreed.
Then came 16 years.
In August 2017 Ram Rahim was convicted of raping 2 of his followers and sentenced to 20 years. His followers rioted across Haryana and Punjab. People died.
In January 2019, a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted Ram Rahim and 3 others of Chhatrapati's murder and sentenced them all to life. His former driver had testified that he heard Ram Rahim order it.
Anshul said afterwards that they had been waiting 16 or 17 years, and that they had suffered a great deal because the man they were fighting was so powerful.
That should have been the end. It was not.
On 7th March 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Ram Rahim in the murder case. It upheld the life sentences of the 3 other men, including the man who fired the shots.
So the people who pulled the trigger are guilty. The court did not find it proved who sent them.
Ram Rahim is still in prison, serving his sentence for rape.
Anshul has taken the case to the Supreme Court. In August 2026 the court issued notice to Ram Rahim.
He has been fighting it since he was a young man. He is still fighting it.
His father printed one letter that nobody else would touch. Everything that happened to Ram Rahim afterwards began with that page.
Charles Assisi retweeted
I watched @rahulkanwal’s 57-minute conversation with @DrAMSinghvi and Harish Salve on the Tata Sons battle on @ndtv.
Most people won’t watch the whole thing. They should.
Beneath the legal sparring are some fundamental questions about who controls Tata Sons.
A thread. 🧵
Charles Assisi retweeted
The most expensive part of a hospital bill may never touch the hospital at all.
A patient admitted for care has no way of knowing whether the price on a medical consumable reflects its actual cost or a markup fixed long before it ever reached the ward. That gap in information is, at its core, a public health issue.
A survey of hospital consumables in Maharashtra found an IV infusion set with a trade price of ₹11.05 carrying a printed MRP of ₹325 ; a markup of 2,841%. A syringe procured at ₹6.75 carried an MRP of ₹57.20. A catheter procured at ₹29.41 carried an MRP of ₹310.
These are not elective purchases. Patients cannot compare prices, seek alternatives, or question a number printed on a box while receiving care and the MRP itself is often fixed upstream by manufacturers and distributors, disconnected from the trade price by a wide, unexplained margin. The result is a system where the party bearing the cost has the least information to evaluate it.
The regulatory gap is structural: scheduled medicines are capped under the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013. Most medical devices and consumables are not leaving both the pricing and the information around it almost entirely unmonitored.
A review of these findings and clear guidelines on the permissible gap between trade procurement price and declared MRP have been recommended to the Department of Pharmaceuticals and the NPPA ; a step toward closing not just a pricing gap, but the information gap patients are left to bear alone.
#PublicHealth #GoodGovernance #Leadership #TukaramMundhe
moneycontrol.com/news/busine…
Charles Assisi retweeted
I am seeing personal AI agents everywhere. But using AI to automate tasks undersells its promise. We need to get it to augment thinking. I'm building a research assistant that knows everything I've ever written, to help me find new ideas in the lacunae of my existing work.
Something is moving on X India. I cannot name it yet. That bothers me more than the obituaries.
I have been lurking long enough to know when a room goes quiet. This one did.
Journalists, founders, late afternoon arguments on politics that would go late into the night.
And then, suddenly, everyone started to post less. I don't think that room is coming back.
And yet the temperature appears to have changed. Not louder. Not friendlier. Just different. As if the people who still think in sentences have started sitting down again, without announcing it.
Is this a dying platform? Or is it that a smaller room is learning a new use?
1/
AI made electricity interesting again.
Suddenly the bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s reliable, 24/7 clean power.
Nuclear is back at the centre. But the real race isn’t over reactor physics.
It’s over industrial organisation. Two roads to thorium are now open.
India has been walking one for seventy years.
A Danish startup is sprinting down the other.
7/
India does not need to abandon the breeder road.
The strategic logic that drove Bhabha still holds — especially in a more contested world. But sovereignty without sufficient speed carries its own risk.
If the manufacturing model succeeds somewhere else first, the technological and geopolitical environment around thorium will have shifted while we were still building inventory.
8/
The first nuclear age was shaped by governments, labs and megaprojects.
The second may be shaped by factories, software, supply chains and the economics of scale. Will global innovation accelerate before India’s long-term thorium vision is fully realised? Brilliant long-read by @sraghotham on @FoundingF
foundingfuel.com/article/the…
— curious how this lands with you.Thoughts from anyone who has lived inside either system?@CphAtomics @thomas__jam
