Silenced, stupid, and stripped of choice
Heyo,
How are you holding up? I am doing fine, thank you for asking. It's Easter weekend so happy Easter! As my Easter Bunny, will you kindly hit reply to this email and answer the following questions:
🐣 What do you find most valuable about DoorDesi?
🐣 What is missing? Something you wish we covered or offered that we currently don't?
🐣 Which other service or publication would you compare DoorDesi to?
Spring is here and with that we are all entering into a new season, I guess? The sun is shining, the world is ending, Ryan Gosling is back on the big screen. So what better time than now to take stock of where we are at with DoorDesi and where we can go. In a couple of months we will be a year old and I want to reflect on our performance a bit and make improvements where possible. Your answer will inform those improvements.
Even if 20% of you respond that will take me further than where I am now. So be one of the 20%. 🐰
Hope you have a great Easter weekend!
Many of you must have heard about a major shake up within the Aam Aadmi Party leadership. Raghav Chadha, one of their most vocal and followed MPs in the Rajya Sabha, was removed as the AAP Deputy Leader by AAP. If you have ever watched someone slowly back away from a group photo, you already understand Raghav Chadha's last four years in the Aam Aadmi Party. The communication, according to party insiders, did not even mention Chadha's name. Which, if you think about it, is a very specific kind of petty.
Chadha joined AAP in 2012, back when the whole thing was still a vibe and not yet a government. He rose fast. Budget drafting, Political Affairs Committee, Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab in 2022. The golden boy arc was very much in motion.
Then came the fame. Aam (common) people, young and old, started noticing him because of his Parliament speeches. He raised the issue of working conditions of gig workers, he raised concerns about the price of food at airports, he pointed out how predatory policies such as minimum balance fines on bank accounts and 28-day mobile recharge rules disproportionately affect the poor, he asked for paternity leave as a right, among other issues. These are issues that plague common people. And he managed to push enough to actually bring some of these changes into effect.
But the criticism of his politics is that it is too sanitised. He never speaks of issues that would really shake BJP to the core. He did not show up when AAP leaders were given clean chit by a Delhi court on recent corruption charges. So, this latest shake up seems more like insecure egos and hurt pride avenging themselves. What remains to be seen is Chadha's next move. Will he stay with the party facing the fate of the likes of Shashi Tharoor in Congress - always the celebrity, never the boss? Will he join BJP and lose the credibility that he has built especially among the youth? Will he start his own party, having to start from scratch?
➡️ This is a reminder that political parties are, at their core, political. People stay useful until they do not. Chadha is still an AAP MP and will remain one "until he chooses to." Which is a very gracious way of saying the door is open and he is welcome to find it himself. The criticism that he does not ruffle BJP feathers is unfair in my honest opinion. An effective opposition does not exist only to ruffle feathers. If it can get work done without ruffling them, why is it so bad?
🔗 Whose birthright is a birthright?
Not many world leaders can get away with calling their own country stupid. Trump can. After attending the US Supreme Court's oral arguments over Trump's executive order from January 2025, which declared that children born in the US to parents who are undocumented or temporarily present are not, in fact, American citizens he posted “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” on social media. No, they are not the only country. At least 37 other countries have it.
A Supreme Court ruling is expected by early summer and based on Wednesday's deliberations, the order is likely to be struck down. This would be the second time in recent months that the Supreme Court has ruled against Trump, after it overturned his tariffs in February.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, says that anyone born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction is a citizen. It was written specifically to ensure that formerly enslaved people could not be stripped of citizenship by hostile state governments. It has governed American law for over 150 years.
Trump's executive order argued that people present illegally or temporarily in the US are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the country and therefore their children are not entitled to citizenship. Every federal court that has looked at this argument has rejected it. The Supreme Court seems inclined to do the same.
➡️ The issue is that even a loss for Trump in court does not mean the administration stops trying to make life difficult for immigrant families through other means. The H-1B situation, visa renewals, green card backlogs, ICE raids, they just keep inventing new ways of creating anxiety in the lives of those who have migrated to the US.
🔗 Your body, the State's choice
So you must have heard something about the Transgender Persons Amendment Act 2026. If you haven't, hi, I would like to ruin your day with more bad news.
In 2014, the Supreme Court said something that should not have been controversial but apparently was. A person's gender is determined by that person. Twelve years later, Parliament has thrown a UNO reverse card at the community by passing the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026.
The 2026 Amendment removes self-identification as the basis for legal recognition of gender identity. In its place, it creates a system where a District Magistrate, advised by a medical board headed by a Chief Medical Officer, decides whether you are transgender enough to get a certificate saying so. Why leave the neighbourhood uncles and aunties out? I am sure they have plenty to say about other people's gender, sex, and all things personal.
This amendment also deletes the categories "trans-man," "trans-woman," and "genderqueer" from the legal definition entirely. And if you want your gender changed on official documents, the law now explicitly requires surgery. So the State has reinserted itself between a person and their own identity because after selling half the country to the ultra rich there isn't much left for them to do I guess. It's not like air quality, infrastructure, standard of living are an issue in the country.
➡️ The 2026 Amendment will almost certainly be challenged in court. Given the trajectory of the last decade, and how many High Courts have passed judgements this past decade, it will probably lose. But in the meantime, real people will navigate a system that has been deliberately made harder. And for what?
🔗 The war is as over as you are over your ex
Five weeks ago, Trump said this would take four to five weeks. Now he is saying 'maybe another three to four weeks but also look at our history. This ain't so bad'. I mean, dude, does anyone check his speeches or does he constantly go off script?
Trump said regime change was never the goal, which would come as news to Trump from January, who very much said regime change was the goal. He then claimed regime change has already happened because the Supreme Leader and most of the senior leadership are dead, and that the new group is "less radical and much more reasonable." Whether the new Iranian leadership sees itself this way is a separate question but who cares. This is his world and we are living in it. He also keeps moving the goalpost when he goes from four weeks to eight to who knows how long. But the wildest of all is him now making the blockade of Strait of Hormuz by Iran Europe's problem. It was operating until right before the US and Israel decided to attack Iran. Now that it is closed, thanks Trump and Bibi, and oil prices are going through the roof and almost every country, and as a result civilians, are struggling, he turns around and goes "y'all deal with it".
Iran is not blinking. President Pezeshkian wrote a letter to the American people this week pointing out that Iran has "outlasted many aggressors" across millennia of history. That is not the language of a country preparing to sign a deal next Tuesday.
➡️ There is a possibility that the price for this prolonged war will be paid in food prices in India over time. At the moment, gas prices and fuel prices have been kept under check by the government. We also have enough food in our stock to last us a while. However, what might take a hit is our fertiliser supply given that the Gulf Cooperation Council is India's largest supplier of urea. Reduced fertiliser supply or expensive fertiliser will hit our yields because either our farmers will use less or pay more for the same thus making food prices skyrocket. Oh, all the ways in which the common man pays the price of the rich's vanity.
Desi heart beat
Odisha turned 90 this week. April 1, 1936. Yes, on April Fool's Day! The Brits had a sense of humour.
Before its founding day the Odia-speaking regions were scattered across Bengal, Madras, Central, and Bihar provinces under British rule because it fit into their divide and rule strategy. The push for a unified Odia province began in earnest in the latter half of the 19th century. The key organisation was the Utkal Sammilani, founded by Madhusudan Das, a lawyer who earned the title "Utkal Gaurav" or Pride of Utkal. The first conference was held in Cuttack in 1903. For the next three decades, Odia leaders submitted petitions, passed resolutions, attended Round Table conferences. Clement Attlee, the future British Prime Minister, headed a subcommittee in 1928 looking into the Odia demand. A boundary committee report in 1932 came out in favour of a separate province. But Odia-speaking regions like Paralakhemundi and Jeypore were initially left out, and leaders had to push again to get them included.
The whole campaign, spanning decades, was conducted almost entirely through conferences, petitions, and intellectual discourse. And it worked. Orissa became a province on April 1, 1936, the first in India to be carved out on a purely linguistic basis.
For 75 years after independence, the state was officially called Orissa and the language Oriya, which is how British administrators had spelled and pronounced them. Parliament finally got around to it in 2011, and the names became Odisha and Odia, which is closer to how the people themselves say it.
➡️ The state's history is one of the cleaner examples of a sustained, organised, non-violent movement actually achieving what it set out to achieve. Odisha gave India its first linguistically defined province. It gave the freedom movement leaders like Gopabandhu Das and Fakir Mohan Senapati. It gave the country its current President. Ninety years in, it still mostly has to remind people it exists. Happy birthday anyway.
That's all for today, folks! If you have any ideas or suggestions for me, please hit reply! I am all ears. :)
