Heat wave's been freaking me out and an anniversary!
Hey there,
This week has been one of those rare weeks in recent months where I have genuinely struggled to get this newsletter across the finish line. The ongoing heatwave in Europe has only made my lack of productivity worse. The fact that I spent most of yesterday trying to get myself off of the floor and to my desk made me think of all the people back home who weathered this year's long heatwave coupled with a meagre monsoon. And I am fully aware of my privileges even compared to the working class Indians back home. As in I know I do not get to compare at all. And that is what made me even sadder. The longer I live abroad, the more I build my life here, the more this guilt takes over that I am not doing enough with my resources and my life to improve the lives of people. I do not know if this is a familiar feeling for you too. But yeah weeks like this one where I just came back from a hiking trip I thoroughly enjoyed in a country that is notorious for how expensive it is and then had to write about how things are in India make me feel disingenuous. So excuse me as I write a short newsletter this week, covering the stories I thought were representative of the week that it has been for India.
On a brighter note, though, today marks, one full year of writing DoorDesi. Maybe that is also why I am feeling the way I am. A bit overwhelmed. I had planned for this issue to be more upbeat and jolly but we can't always control how things work out. But still, happy anniversary, guys! Thank you for tuning in every week and validating this newsletter. I will see you next week on a better, more hopeful note, I hope.
I have been doing this for exactly a year now. I feel like I have built a relationship with you guys here. But this does take a lot of time for me to do. So, if you find value in this too and would like to buy me a coffee, please do consider it. It will go a long way into supporting this newsletter.
Thank you!
Just the gist
A bunch of exam papers leaked, protests erupted, a whole new political movement started. So of course someone had to be held accountable, right? Well, there you have it. Telegram is the reason our youth is suffering.
The government blocked Telegram across the entire country this week, used by over 150 million people, for six days, ahead of the NEET re-examination.
After the original NEET-UG exam was cancelled in May over a paper leak, reports surfaced that Telegram groups had been selling leaked question papers to desperate students. The government and Telegram were in contact for weeks. Telegram says it took down over 1,200 links the government flagged, usually within an hour of being asked. Then, on June 16, days before the re-exam, the government issued an order blocking the entire Telegram platform in India until June 22, and disabled its message editing feature until June 30. Telegram challenged this in court. The Delhi High Court heard it on June 18 and upheld the block on June 19.
The court accepted the government's argument that Section 69A of the IT Act, the provision used to block content, can be used to block an entire app, not just specific pieces of content within it. The Attorney General reportedly compared Telegram to "Frankenstein" to argue it was uniquely dangerous because of its large group sizes, cloud storage, bot ecosystem, and message editing feature. Large group sizes, bot ecosystem, message editing feature makes me think of a certain political party as well and they are definitely uniquely dangerous if you ask me.
The court applied the proportionality test which requires the government to show there was no less intrusive alternative available. Targeted takedowns of specific leaked content, the exact thing Telegram had already been cooperating on for weeks, were available and had been used successfully. The court accepted a blanket platform block anyway, reasoning that its temporary nature limited the harm. Temporary is not the same as least restrictive, sir!
MeitY invoked an emergency provision that bypasses the standard pre-decisional hearing, against a company that had been actively cooperating with the government for weeks. That hearing exists as a safeguard precisely for situations like this. Skipping it here, against a cooperative party, raises real fairness questions.
➡️ The court has now given a clearer legal basis for blocking an entire app rather than specific content within it, available the next time the government decides any platform is being misused by some of its users. That is a significant expansion of power with very little judicial pushback. The examination leak problem was real and serious. Whether shutting down an entire communication platform used by millions of innocent people was the right tool to fix it is a different question, and one the court did not answer particularly rigorously.
🔗 India's SIP boom is suffering from too much faith
In May 2026, Indians invested Rs 30,954 crore in mutual funds through SIPs. In March, it was Rs 32,087 crore, the highest ever. Over the last three months, Rs 94,156 crore has gone into SIPs, more than was invested in entire years a decade ago. SIPs have become the default way Indians save and invest, marketed relentlessly as the safe, disciplined, can't-go-wrong choice. Now the very success of SIPs has started working against the people putting money into them.
SIP investing works on cost averaging: you buy more units when prices fall and fewer when prices rise, so the dips work in your favour over time. That only works if prices actually fluctuate. Indian stock prices went almost straight up between 2020 and 2024, then mostly held steady. No volatility means no cost averaging, which means the entire mechanism that makes SIPs work fails.
The flood of SIP money has also outpaced the supply of stocks large and liquid enough to absorb it. Too much money chasing the same stocks pushed up prices faster than company earnings grew, particularly for mid and small cap stocks, where over 30% more than tripled in three years according to a former SEBI official. That is the stock market's version of inflation.
When stock prices rise on the back of money pouring in, insiders sell. Foreign institutional investors have net sold over Rs 4.65 lakh crore of Indian stocks since April 2024. Venture capital-backed startups have used the IPO boom to cash out at high valuations. Promoters of listed companies sold Rs 1.38 lakh crore worth of shares in 2025 alone. All of this selling needed buyers, and SIP investors, religiously putting in their monthly amounts regardless of price, have been exactly that buyer.
➡️ If you or your family are SIPing into Indian mutual funds, this explains what you are actually buying into. Returns over seven and ten years have been decent, around 13% annually, but those investors started before the pandemic-era price surge and benefited from cost averaging that has not been available to anyone who started in the last five years. If you started SIPing in the last few years expecting those same historical returns, recalibrate your expectations. Keep an emergency fund of at least six months. Do not put everything into equity. The stock market cannot only go up, and for SIP investors to actually benefit from the strategy they are using, it eventually needs to come down before it goes back up.
🔗 In the guise of religion
The Uttar Pradesh government has set up a Special Investigation Team to probe allegations that donations to the Ram Mandir have gone missing. This is not a new kind of controversy for the temple. It is the latest in a list that goes back decades.
The most serious historical allegation comes from the Nirmohi Akhara, a centuries-old order of Ramanandi sadhus and one of the original litigants in the Ayodhya title dispute. The Akhara has accused the Vishva Hindu Parishad of swindling over Rs 1,400 crore collected from devotees since the late 1980s, alleging the money was used to build VHP's own organisational infrastructure and fund political campaigns rather than the temple itself. The VHP has consistently denied this and says it has maintained meticulous records since 1964.
There is also the matter of the shila pujan campaign from 1989-1990, when the VHP collected millions of consecrated bricks along with cash offerings from villages across India for the temple's construction. The Akhara alleges that neither the cash nor the bricks were ever transparently accounted for.
More recent controversies are easier to verify because they involve specific, documented transactions. In 2021, AAP leader Sanjay Singh and SP leader Pawan Pandey alleged that a plot of land was bought by private individuals for Rs 2 crore and resold to the temple trust just five to ten minutes later for Rs 18.5 crore. The trust's explanation, that the lower figure reflected an outdated agreement while the higher one was current market value has remained odd.
➡️ What makes the current SIT investigation different is that it was requested by the trust itself, which is either a sign of genuine concern about internal mismanagement or an attempt to get ahead of a story before it becomes one the government cannot control. Either way, the pattern across nearly four decades is consistent: large sums of money moving through religious and political networks with limited public accounting, recurring allegations from credible insiders like the Nirmohi Akhara, and very few of these controversies ever reaching a clear, independently verified conclusion.
🔗 Footpaths are for our feet, confirms SC
A five-year-old boy was crushed to death by a truck while walking to school with his father. That is the case that led the Supreme Court, on Friday, to declare something that should have been obvious decades ago: walking on a demarcated, maintained footpath is a fundamental right, and it overrides the privilege of motorised vehicles.
Justice P.S. Narasimha called walking "the simplest of the simple human activity, inextricably connected to life," and traced how India's roads have been built almost entirely around vehicles, with walking treated as an afterthought or an inconvenience. The judgment goes further, noting that motorised transport "was only for the rich" to begin with, and that as cheaper vehicles spread, walkers got pushed to the margins of roads they had every right to use.
The court directly criticised the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 for treating human interests as incidental to vehicles rather than the other way around, and called for a new statutory framework that names specific duty-bearers, establishes a dedicated regulator, and provides quick remedies when the right to walk is violated. Copies of the judgment have been sent to the Ministries of Housing and Urban Affairs, Rural Development, and Road Transport and Highways, as well as the Law Commission of India, essentially instructing the government to start building the legal architecture that should have existed long ago.
➡️ This ruling will mean nothing in practice unless cities and states actually act on it. India's footpaths, where they exist at all, are routinely encroached upon by parked vehicles, vendors, construction debris, and electrical infrastructure, forcing pedestrians onto the road regardless of what any court says. Whether municipal bodies, who have spent decades building flyovers and widening roads while ignoring pavements, will actually respond to that demand is the real test.
That's all for this week, folks! Keeping it short so you can stay sunscreened, hydrated, and happy!
