Democratising entrepreneurship with https://xitter.cf/t.co/sqIjomZnRD & https://xitter.cf/t.co/Ua9rfNPo8K Indian; techie; learner; educationist; sport lover; pet parent
Bangalore
Joined March 2008
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Why Scale Impact?
This is a question I am asked a lot, especially amongst Development sector(Non Profits) professionals.
and my response is not as a technologist, because you can
but as a citizen - because we must.
To me - this question is like asking: why social change?
🧵
Mekin retweeted
I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene".
Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too.
Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.
Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to...
Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.
Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.
Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.
Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.
Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.
Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.
Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.
Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.
Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to...
Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.
Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.
VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.
DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.
Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic.
I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.
Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list.
Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇
Mekin retweeted
NEWS FLASH: P.V SINDHU storms into FINAL of French Open (Super 750) 🔥
Beat WR 22 Hina Akechi 21-10, 20-22, 21-16 in Semis.
#FrenchOpen2026
This was a fun interview to do- anchored around AI solutions that @UdhyamOrg has built being used by 7L+ govt school students
The format allowed for it to be free flowing!
Thank you Sudhi! for a lively and thoughtful conversation about education!
lnkd.in/gm7KW7NM
Mekin retweeted
I am releasing my full documentary titled: Paris 3 Days Later... I dropped everything to go to Paris because it was clear from the footage that this is could be coming to America next.
I couldn't believe my eyes, just burned up upside down cars lying on the street. The crazier part was just seeing people walk around it like it was nothing.
In the video you'll see interviews I did with an anarchist and a communist that justified the riots. You'll hear from a woman who feels unsafe going home after work every night. Most of all you'll actually see that the majority of the people in the city do not want their city to burn.
I will continue my reporting here and be at the next riot.
The best way to support my reporting is to subscribe on X.
Mekin retweeted
I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.
I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.
We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.
It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.
Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.
287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.
We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.
Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.
A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.
And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.
People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.
So who did we give it to?
An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.
She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.
The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.
Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.
It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.
But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.
That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.
We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.
He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.
Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.
Mekin retweeted
'Run of life' by Vithya Ramraj to overtake the Chinese athlete in the final leg of 4x400m relay which helped India to win its first Athletics Gold Medal at Asian Games 2026.🔥
Mekin retweeted
In 24 shots in the final of the Compound Archery Women’s team event vs China, the Indian team of Prithika, Chikitha and Jyoti Surekha hit the 10, 22 times out of 24, with just two 9s. Equalled the World Record. That is the kind of top form we need in a pressure match to win Gold
Mekin retweeted
Stories we would like to commission for @AlterMagIndia.
DMs Open.
Mekin retweeted
I want to tell you about a number that broke my brain yesterday. 899 runs in 11 ODI innings. That is what Virat Kohli has done recently. Sounds impossible, right?
Wait! He once made almost 1000 runs in just 10 innings(995 runs to be precise) . That is a man rewriting what human beings are allowed to do with a cricket bat.
But here is the thing that actually made me sit down and stare at the wall. Take any stretch of innings. Any! From 10 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 375. Pick one at random. Kohli has more runs in that stretch than anyone else who has ever played this game. He has not even played 375 ODIs. He might never play 375 ODIs. The record exists in a future that has not hapkened yet and he already owns it.
But numbers are not why I am writing this random post.
He said something after West Indies game. He said he got a challenge to unlock a new version. To up the ante. To play a gear higher.
His ODI blueprint was already perfect. Everyone said so. You cannot improve on perfection. But he did. He is hitting aerial shots now, straight away, as soon as he walks in. No settling period. No getting stuck against spin. No weakness for any software to find. If you fed his batting into most advanced analysis program on earth and asked for one flaw, one tiny crack, the machine would probably overheat and shut down.
He made 139* off 88 balls. His 3rd fastest century. 15000 runs ticked off like it was nothing. Like it was just another Sunday.
What gets me is not the numbers. It is the refusal. refusal to be finished. refusal to let age decide when his story ends. He could have walked away years ago, rich and famous and untouchable. Instead he chose to keep evolving, keep working, keep finding that extra gear when everyone assumed all the gears were already used up.
Because we have watched the other Virat too. The angry one, the one carrying the whole country on his back, the one who never let himself breathe. Somewhere in these 20 years he learnt to put that weight down. And the runs only got louder when he did.
He plays with a free mind now. That is what he says. And you can see it. The joy is back. violence is controlled. hunger is still there, burning quidtly under everything.
Some players retire and become memories. Kohli is becoming something else. Something we do not have a word for yet.
He is not playing cricket anymore. He is composing a love letter to the game and we are lucky enough to read it as he writes.
Mekin retweeted
10 minutes of TikTok was enough to impair people’s ability to remember and carry out intentions.
Twitter and YouTube didn’t show the same decline.
Rapid context-switching may be where most of cognitive cost is.
Mekin retweeted
Richard Hadlee broke his head, Malcolm Marshall knocked out his teeth, Imran Khan knocked him unconscious and Michael Holding sent him to hospital. And yet Mohinder Amarnath got 3 centuries in Pakistan, 2 in the West Indies and 1 against Thommo in Australia. In those days, batting against the frightening pace of Holding, Imran and the West Indians involved a bit more than just skill, it needed raw courage and Jimmy Amarnath had that in dollops.
Jimmy turns 76 today & India's first Man of the Match in a World Cup final(and semi-final) certainly deserves much more acclaim and attention
(Picture Credit: The Guardian)
Mekin retweeted
This has been a decade to celebrate, as far as Men's Badminton is concerned for India:
• Kidambi Srikanth became the 1st Indian player to reach the finals of World Championships, Lakshya in the same edition clinched bronze.
• India had never won a gold at the Asian Games, Chirag and Satwik won a gold in the previous edition.
• After 41 years, HS Prannoy won a medal in the men's singles for India at the Asian Games.
• Chirag and Satwik winning bronze medals in the World Championships in Tokyo and Paris.
• Medals in consecutive editions, with regards to the men's team including a final.
• And the biggest of them all, the winners of the Thomas Cup in 2022, and a bronze in 2026.
Yes there's definitely space for more, but a fair amount of achievements to celebrate as well. In all likelihood this was Srikanth and Prannoy's last Asian Games appearance, happy that they will end it with a medal.
Mekin retweeted
Pratham co-hosted the session "India's New Skilling Journey: Aspiration, Access, and Beyond" at #charcha2026. Meenakshi Ramesh, CEO, Pratham, opened the session by drawing focus on making skills training aspirational, gaps in the ecosystem, workforce readiness and accessibility.
Mekin retweeted
Based on recent discussions: what does a 'progress mentality' for a young person look like?
We need a push an optimistic, forward-looking cultural norm to replace "explore your true self", "get rich", "criticize injustice", "zero-sum resentment". Here's my eight-part catechism:
Mekin retweeted
Tomorrow would mark 12 years since we launched the first beta version of @TeamPratilipi.
What a journey it has been.
On one hand, I am a bit disappointed with where we have gotten considering the 12 years.
On the other hand, I am so very proud of how we have gotten here.
Mekin retweeted
🧵1. Attentionpocalypse
A thread on a process of worldwide illiteratization, with some evidence on the mechanism.
Today, the OECD produced evidence of an accelerating drop (by now equivalent to almost 2 years of schooling) in reading scores since 2012.
Mekin retweeted
For years, doctors noticed something strange about vaccines in India.
Vaccines that worked well in Europe and America worked less well in Indian children. Same vaccine, same dose, weaker protection.
Most people accepted it. One scientist in Vellore spent 30 years asking why.
Her name is Gagandeep Kang.
She trained as a doctor at Christian Medical College in Vellore, in Tamil Nadu, and then did something unusual for a physician. She went into the laboratory and stayed there.
Her subject was the gut.
Specifically, the guts of children in poor households. She studied what repeated diarrhoeal infection does to a child's intestine over the first years of life.
What she found matters enormously. Those repeated infections do not just make a child ill. They damage the lining of the gut, stunt growth, and interfere with how the body responds to oral vaccines.
That is why a vaccine developed in a clean environment abroad underperforms in a child who has had 10 infections before the age of 2. The problem was never the vaccine. It was what the child's gut had already been through.
Then she went further than diagnosis.
Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea in small children and it kills a very large number of them. India had access to imported rotavirus vaccines, but they were expensive and often out of reach for the families who needed them most.
Kang led the clinical trials for Rotavac, India's first indigenous rotavirus vaccine, made by an Indian company. She was also central to the work behind a second one, Rotasiil.
Both are now approved by the World Health Organisation. Rotavac went into India's national immunisation programme, which means it reaches children whose parents pay nothing for it.
In 2019 she became the first Indian woman scientist working in India to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the scientific body founded in London in 1660. It took 359 years.
She has served on the World Health Organisation's global advisory committee on vaccine safety, and she now leads global health work at one of the largest health foundations in the world.
She built her career on a question most people did not think was worth asking.
Not how do we get vaccines to poor children. But why do they not work as well when they get there.
