Exciting prospects, promising deals, and social media frenzy

Hey lovelies,

What a week it has been haan? Cockroaches everywhere. Major deals being struck by the government of India in Europe. Press freedom in India (or the lack thereof) coming under scrutiny internationally. And Melody.

I have spent more time online this week than the rest of the month combined. I am raging. I am hopeful. I am excited. I am tired. I also have so many thoughts about so much. You'll read it below. But here I want to say just one thing. Question everything. Question me. Don't trust the first thing you see. When someone shares a post online, take a minute to ask the 5 Why’s and verify information beyond Instagram/Facebook/YT. Information bubble is dangerous. It is your responsibility to find your way out of it. To remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it's usually exactly that. Not true.

If you have any questions about how to tell if something is fake or misinformation, drop me a line and we can figure it out together.

Okay byeeeee!

Just the gist

🔗 Great opportunities, greater shame

A week after Modi asked Indians to not go abroad in order to 'save the country, he boarded a plane and left, for abroad. :D He also dropped by my neighbourhood recently and I obviously have thoughts.

He has been on a European tour these past two weeks. Russia's war on Ukraine, Trump's tariffs, and the Iran war have all hit India's economy and energy security simultaneously. The response has been to widen the net: sign trade deals, build new partnerships, reduce dependence on any single relationship. The Nordic summit in Oslo on Tuesday is the most visible expression of that strategy.

India's trade with the five Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark, stood at $19 billion in 2024. That sounds significant until you compare it to what is on the table: a commitment from the EFTA bloc, which includes Norway and Iceland, to mobilise $100 billion in FDI into India over 15 years and potentially create a million jobs. The Nordic countries are world leaders in green technology, renewable energy, digital innovation, and maritime solutions, all of which align with what India says it needs. The summit's agenda covers trade, climate, energy security, defence, space, and the Arctic.

India has had a research station in Svalbard, Norway since 2008 and deployed an underwater observatory there in 2014. It received observer status on the Arctic Council in 2013. At this summit, India is pushing to establish a formal India-Nordic Arctic mechanism. The Arctic is rich in natural gas and minerals, and both China and Russia are expanding their footprint there aggressively. China's Polar Silk Road initiative is specifically designed to secure control of Arctic resources and new shipping routes. India cannot just witness it from the sidelines.

Before Oslo, Modi visited the Netherlands, where Tata Electronics signed a deal with Dutch technology giant ASML to build a semiconductor plant in western India, which is a significant win given how tightly ASML controls access to its chip-making technology. He also met the Dutch PM, who told local media beforehand that the Netherlands has serious concerns about press freedom and minority rights in India, particularly for the Muslim community. India's response was that such questions reflect "a lack of understanding of the person who asks the question." The Dutch PM raised the concerns anyway in the meeting. And we all know what happened in Norway, don't we?

➡️ For the diaspora, this trip came with some second hand embarrassment. The way the Indian delegation handles the press in almost every country and the off- and on- handed responses of the Dutch and Norwegian state leaders about concerns about the state of India are signs of the declining respect for India as a possible alternative to the multipolar world we are seeing being built in the wake of the unpopularity of the U.S. at the global stage.

🔗 Betting on another man's unpopularity

Trump's approval rating is at 37% in the US right now, with 67% of survey respondents unhappy about the Iran war. India is hoping for this to turn his attention to domestic affairs which might put an end to the conflict, or at least give a long enough pause, that gives the global economy room to breathe. The rupee is hitting record lows every week and the oil import bill is ballooning. So India needs this war to stop.

What it can do is manage its energy situation better, and there were signs this week that it is trying. During PM Modi's brief visit to the UAE on May 15, the two countries reached an agreement on continuing UAE participation in India's strategic petroleum reserves. The UAE will store crude in India's new caverns at Chandikhol and Padur, while India gets access to storage in Fujairah. The Fujairah facility matters because it sits outside the Strait of Hormuz. In the current situation, that is not a minor detail.

The UAE's recent exit from OPEC adds another dimension. Freed from production quotas, Abu Dhabi's oil major ADNOC can now offer India long-term government-to-government supply contracts at negotiated volumes and prices without cartel constraints. Rupee-dirham oil trade settlement, which has been discussed for years, becomes more viable when the UAE is no longer tethered to OPEC's dollar-denominated norms. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US, is also designed to build connectivity routes that bypass the Strait entirely. The strategic logic is sound.

The numbers, however, are sobering. India's strategic petroleum reserves currently cover roughly 74 days of national demand. Japan holds 254 days. South Korea holds 210 days. China holds an estimated 90 to 100 days. The International Energy Agency, which India aspires to join as a full member, mandates a minimum of 90 days for its members. India is below that baseline. Expansion facilities at Chandikhol and Padur were supposed to be completed by 2023-24. They are not done yet, delayed by land acquisition, environmental clearances, and financing models that have struggled to attract capital.

➡️ The UAE deal is a genuine step in the right direction, and the OPEC exit creates a real opening for India to lock in better long-term energy arrangements. But 74 days of reserves during a war that has already lasted longer than anyone expected is not comfortable. The government needs to stop relying on public-private partnerships to fund strategic infrastructure and commit dedicated capital to finishing what it started. Energy security is not a nice-to-have. The current crisis is demonstrating, in real time and in rupees, exactly what it costs when you do not have it.

🔗 Holy cow!

One of the first things the new BJP government in West Bengal did after coming to power was enforce a 1950 law that had largely been sitting on the shelf, banning the slaughter of cattle below the age of 14 without a joint certificate from the head of a panchayat or municipality and a registered veterinarian. The order covers bulls, bullocks, cows, calves, buffaloes, and buffalo calves. It came into effect immediately, just ahead of Eid.

The law itself is not new. The Calcutta High Court had also issued a related order in 2018. But enforcement is everything, and the timing of this enforcement is not subtle. We all know why the BJP did this. It was not a coincidence that it happened in the days before Bakr-i-Eid. The us-versus-them narrative writes itself, and the BJP knows how to write it.

Cow markets across the state have emptied out. Polerhat Goru Haat in South 24 Parganas, where nearly 2,000 cows would be sold daily before the order, now has a couple of dozen. The core problem is that there is no established mechanism to determine an animal's age. Cow sellers who have borrowed from bank and moneylenders to buy cattle are now struggling.

The Muslim community has largely said it is willing to comply with the regulation, and has urged the government to put the right mechanisms in place to allow them to do so. That is a reasonable ask. The government has not responded with a reasonable answer. The state-owned slaughterhouse in Kolkata's Tangra has been shut for two days with no notice.

➡️ Like I often say here, the ones who often suffer the most as a result of divisive governance are often the most vulnerable people for whom, Hindu Muslim Sikh matter far less than the next meal.

🔗 Putin's trip and India's security

Trump visited Beijing last week. Putin arrived this week. That two of the world's most consequential leaders made high-level visits to China within days of each other is not a coincidence. It is a signal about where the centre of global diplomacy has shifted.

The Putin-Xi summit on Wednesday was, by most accounts, more substantive than the Trump-Xi meeting before it. The two sides signed over 40 agreements covering energy, technology, transport, space, and digital cooperation, and issued a joint statement criticising what they called unilateral and hegemonic policies, without naming the US, while pledging to work toward a multipolar world order.

The relationship is not a natural one historically. Russia and China have centuries of border tension, ideological rivalry, and the famous Sino-Soviet schism of the 1960s that led to actual armed clashes in 1969. What has brought them together is not affinity but a shared structural rivalry with the United States. Whether this becomes a formal military alliance is a separate question, and most analysts say it will not, because neither side wants to get dragged into the other's conflicts. China does not want to be pulled into Russia's war with the West. Russia does not want to be pulled into a Taiwan crisis. The partnership will deepen but likely stop short of a formal commitment.

➡️ For India, this matters more than it might appear. For two decades, Delhi has managed a careful balance: security partnership with the US, strong ties with Russia, enough room to manoeuvre between the two. That balance is getting harder to maintain. Russia is now economically dependent on China in a way that limits its independence. Trump is simultaneously cosying up to Beijing and to Islamabad. The traditional levers India has used to manage its continental security are shifting under its feet, and the Operation Sindoor aftermath showed that Delhi has not yet figured out how to replace them. The world is reorganising itself around Beijing and India needs a clearer strategy for that world than it currently has.

🔗 Consequential leaks, avoidable disaster

If this feels familiar, it is because it is. NEET-UG 2026, the entrance examination that determines medical college admissions for hundreds of thousands of students across India, has been cancelled after a paper leak. The re-examination is now scheduled for June 21.

The alleged network, as it is emerging from court submissions, had a depressingly organised structure. A Pune-based botany professor named Manisha Mandhare, who was reportedly involved in the exam's question-setting process, is at the centre of it. According to the CBI, she conducted special coaching sessions for select students at her home in April, dictating botany and zoology questions from memory rather than distributing printed papers, which is the kind of operational caution that suggests this was not her first time thinking about how not to get caught. From there, the material moved through a neighbour, then to an intermediary Ayurveda practitioner, then to a man named Shubham Khairnar who allegedly passed it further north, where it eventually ended up on Telegram as PDFs four days before the exam. A father in Rajasthan allegedly paid Rs 10 to 12 lakh for leaked papers for his son, got printouts made, and distributed them to relatives and acquaintances. Inside job to coaching circle to intermediary to Telegram to Rajasthan, in several weeks.

➡️ Beyond the immediate disruption, this is the second major NEET scandal in as many years, and it points to the same structural problem: an examination of this scale and consequence, with this much money riding on it, will keep attracting organised attempts to compromise it as long as the rewards are high enough and the insider access is available. The CBI will catch some people. The systemic question of how question-setters are vetted, isolated, and monitored is the one that keeps not getting answered.

Trending on the internet

🔗 Roaches and the machinery

On May 15, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, presiding over a Supreme Court bench, described unemployed young Indians as "like cockroaches" who, failing to find jobs, turn to social media, journalism, and RTI activism to attack the system. He also called such individuals "parasites of society." These were not words from a politician at a rally, which would have been bad enough. They came from the highest judicial office in the country, the office constitutionally charged with being the final guardian of every citizen's dignity.

The backlash was immediate. The CJI issued a clarification the next day saying he had been misquoted, that he was referring specifically to people who had entered professions using fake degrees, and that he sees Indian youth as "pillars of a developed India." Whether you find that clarification convincing probably depends on how closely you read the original remarks.

What is not ambiguous is the history of the words themselves. These are not random insults. They are the specific vocabulary that precedes mass violence, and the record on this is extensive and documented. In Rwanda, between April and July 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. The killing was preceded by years in which government-allied radio stations systematically called Tutsis "inyenzi," cockroaches. Teachers made Tutsi children stand up in classrooms and called them cockroaches in front of their peers. By the time the machetes came out, an entire population had already been stripped of its humanity. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda later convicted radio leadership for incitement to genocide through precisely this language.

In Nazi Germany, Jews were called parasites and rats in official pamphlets, schoolbooks, and speeches so routinely that it became, as Holocaust scholar Victor Klemperer documented, "mechanically and unconsciously absorbed" by ordinary Germans. A 2022 study in PLOS ONE found that Jews were progressively stripped of human mental attributes in state media in the years before the Holocaust. The word parasite was not merely an insult. It invoked a biological logic: parasites are not negotiated with. They are removed from the host body. The violence against parasites is framed as a cure rather than a crime.

This is why international law developed after these atrocities is unambiguous. The Genocide Convention prohibits incitement that includes sustained dehumanising language. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires states to prohibit advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination or hostility. The Rabat Plan of Action, a UN framework on hate speech, specifically weights the position and authority of the speaker when assessing harm. A chief justice of the Supreme Court scores very high on that criterion.

The CJI's language also reaches places no politician's speech can. When the apex court describes RTI activists and unemployed youth as cockroaches, every subordinate court in India receives a signal about whose grievances are legitimate. Every government official who faces an RTI query receives a signal about how to regard the person filing it. The Right to Information Act exists precisely to enable citizens, including unemployed citizens with no institutional standing, to hold power accountable. Article 19 protects free speech and the press. Article 21 protects the right to live with dignity. The chief justice compared those who exercise these constitutionally protected rights to cockroaches, from the bench that is their ultimate enforcer. India Hate Lab documented 141 political speeches in 2025 alone in which minorities were described as termites, parasites, insects, and bloodthirsty zombies. The CJI's words did not stand apart from that ecosystem. By virtue of their source, they amplified it.

The internet responded with something more creative than outrage. The Cockroach Janata Party was born. Founded by Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist currently based in the US, the CJP is a satirical meme-driven movement that crossed 11.9 million Instagram followers in five days, surpassing the BJP's 8.7 million. The manifesto speaks directly to the frustrations of young Indians with unemployment and a system that ignores them. Dipke worked with AAP between 2020 and 2022, which has led to accusations that he is a plant. He has hidden none of this. Treating it as an expose is lazy. And even if every conspiracy theory about his intentions were true, the manifesto points would still be accurate.

➡️ What I genuinely hope does not happen is that the CJP becomes an outlet for frustration that fizzles out online having changed nothing. The energy is real. The anger is legitimate. The words "cockroach" and "parasite," when used by the most powerful judge in the country to describe young people who ask questions and file RTIs, are not just offensive. They are historically legible. Anyone who has read what those words have been used to justify should understand why they cannot be waved away with a clarification. We might have something in this movement. It would be a shame to waste it on follower counts.

That's all for this week, folks! Take care and see yaaa next week!