Tennis and mathematics. What else is there? OK: My name is not Inigo Montoya.
Bombay, India
Joined July 2009
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Dear Sanjeev, why then is the government you serve giving free food to 80+cr Indians who are too poor to feed themselves?
Again note: I thoroughly approve of this free food programme.
Right. Your resort to empty barbs shows that you cannot reconcile - as nobody can - a claim of reducing poverty to 2.6% with 80+cr Indians so unable to feed themselves that the government has to give them free food.
Why are you (I assume) and me not getting the free food, then? After all, I would like more disposable income and I assume so would you.
Rationalize it all you want. The truth is, and you know it, that the free food programme is a stark sign of poverty in this country.
Free food enables family to have more disposable income which they may have spent on food.
Gov providing free food and poverty reduction can happen at same time. Vision to solve basic problems India ia facing, happened under leadership of @narendramodi
He is an ordinary actor. But more than that, an ordinary citizen who, like plenty of other ordinary citizens, is dismayed at the state of our country under the BJP. If saying so makes him, and us, Dimagi Naxals for you, he, and we, wear that label with pride.
Dilip D'Souza retweeted
The Gateway of India was built in Bombay. The Taj Mahal Palace opened in Bombay. Marine Drive became the Queen’s Necklace in Bombay. Victoria Terminus, the Rajabai Clock Tower and Bombay’s extraordinary Art Deco district emerged from Bombay’s evolution as a global city.
Bombay gave India Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Homi Bhabha, Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Farokh Engineer, Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and great industrialists from the Tata legacy. It nurtured a world-class financial centre, a textile revolution and the Hindi film industry.
Bombay’s identity has been shaped by the Kolis, Parsis, Gujaratis, Sindhis, Marwaris, Marathi communities and diverse communities from across India. Bombay is a city, a culture and an emotion, built by generations of people who built it and called it home.
The 1995 renaming was a political decision. It cannot make that history disappear, or render the identity of millions who knew it as Bombay any less legitimate.
Call it Mumbai if you wish. But don’t force me to. And don’t reduce the history of a great city to serve a single community or a single political narrative.
I genuinely have a question to all those who still call the city as Bombay and not Mumbai.
It has been 30 years since the city is renamed as Mumbai. And still the non-native speakers insist on calling it Bombay. Some of the native speakers also go by the same name while speaking in Hindi or English. I see that in reels, filmy people conversations, college kids' conversations, and everywhere else too.
I don't really have an issue with whatever you wanna call the city but the insistence of calling it Bombay is like disrespecting the local identity and language and feelings of the original inhabitants. And though Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city, it has its own language, culture, food, identify. The local flavour needs to be RESPECTED.
And don't give me a political argument.... Some of you weren't even born when the politics around it happened. Apart from that, what is the reason?
Dilip D'Souza retweeted
The Mumbai vs Bombay debate is so pointless. You don’t call your loved one by their original name but by a name filled with love. Mumbai is her real name and Bombay is what we call her with love! Let’s move on to better things like making it a better city to live in for everyone!
Dilip D'Souza retweeted
A team of experts free from political bias needs to travel across India to understand what our poverty actually looks like on the ground.
Headline numbers must be examined carefully.
I once did this exercise for Shamika Ravi.
Last year, the Indus Valley report observed that around 80% of Indians have negligible or zero ability to spend on discretionary goods.
Rama Bijapurkar is widely regarded as one of the most reliable experts on Indian consumption.
Her consumer segmentation:
L5 (Affluent): Annual household spend of ₹11.24 lakh+, covering just 25 million people
L4 (Resilient): ₹5.4 to 7 lakh, covering 71 million people
L3 (Real Middle): ₹3.8 to 5.4 lakh, covering 200 million people
L2 (Strained Mass): ₹2.2 to 3.8 lakh, covering 432 million people
L1 (Vulnerables): ₹1.1 to 2.2 lakh, covering a massive 707 million people
These figures refer to household expenditure, not individual spending.
Taken together, L1 and L2 account for nearly 80% of India’s population. For them, everyday life is a constant struggle. They are living on the edge.
The others are not living in luxury, but the scale of vulnerability at the bottom is stark.
80% of the country is just surviving and that too with great difficulty.
Over the years I have shared extensive data on income, expenditure, wealth and poverty.
We see only what we want to see.
We simply refuse to face reality.
2.6%? Really? Then why is this government distributing free food to 80+cr Indians - close to 60% of us - who are too poor to feed themselves? How does that square with your 2%, Tejasvi?
Note: I thoroughly approve of this free food programme.
History will perhaps judge Prime Minister Narendra Modi as one of the most consequential reformers of our times, in the league of Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping. In one crucial respect, his achievement may be even more remarkable.
The World Bank’s latest estimates reveal an extraordinary transformation. Nearly 50 crore Indians moved above the lower-middle-income poverty line between 2011–12 and 2023–24. Extreme poverty fell from 27.1% to just 2.6%.
Consider the circumstances in which this transformation has taken place. A decade marked by a global pandemic, wars, geopolitical instability, supply chain disruptions and slowing global growth. Yet India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing major economies.
But what makes Modi’s leadership truly exceptional is the political environment in which he has pursued this transformation.
Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, once famously remarked, “No single person can change India.” He pointed to India’s extraordinary linguistic and social diversity and the immense difficulty of governing such a complex nation. He contrasted this with China, which he considered far easier to govern and transform because of its more centralised political system and greater linguistic cohesion.
Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore. Deng Xiaoping transformed China. Both were extraordinary leaders. But Singapore was a small city-state, while China’s transformation took place under a one-party political system.
India is different. A billion-plus people. Hundreds of languages. Extraordinary social, cultural and regional diversity. Competitive elections, powerful state governments, independent institutions, competing interests and multiple constitutional checks and balances.
Reforming a country of this complexity, at this scale, while continuously seeking and winning the people’s democratic mandate, requires a rare combination of political acumen, administrative ability and leadership.
Modi has demonstrated that democracy and decisive development are not mutually exclusive.
That is perhaps his greatest contribution, not just to India, but to the global faith in democracy itself.
When the history of great reformers of the 21st century is written, Narendra Modi will deserve a place among the foremost.
Dilip D'Souza retweeted
Journalist: Why did the BJP lose in Modi’s constituency?
BJP alliance partner: Because only educated voters voted in this election.
😂😂
All those harrumphing about @lpolgreen spending a week in India, out on the streets alongside protesters and writing about it for the @nytimes - I wonder how many of them spent not a week, but even five minutes with the protesters.
Here's a journalist who spent a week in a country and wrote an article assessing the mood there. slate.com/news-and-politics/…
I would love to see respect for mandates to: not litter. Pick up your dog's poop. Observe speed limits. Not spit. Etc. You get the idea.
Instead it is a name that gets people upset.
Understand: Nobody has an issue with Mumbai. I like the name. I am a native resident as much as anyone else.
I say "hapus" in Marathi, "alphonso" in English. "Rugnalay" in Marathi, "hospital" in English, "aspatal" in Hindi.
People get used to saying things in each language.
There are plenty of other examples. That's not the point. The point is the suggestion that using a different name in different languages, as happens with so many places, is somehow "disrespect".
What apples, what oranges?
Those names are different in different languages. No Japanese person will be baffled if I call her country "Japan", but that doesn't change the fact that she calls it "Nihon" or "Nippon" in her language. If I learned Japanese, that's what I'd call it.
They stood with facts.
If Young India learns one thing from the EC protest debacle, let it be this: outrage has a price ... a price we only pay. Think! How many crores did our economy lose? How much public money was wasted? How many innocent vendors and shopkeepers lost daily wages? How many reputations were destroyed? And for what? Clicks, clout and virtue-signalling? Guys––Outrage isn’t evidence. Slogans aren’t statutes. Virality isn’t veracity. So, GenZ, protest––but protest better. Question––but question smarter. Take a stand––but stand with facts.
Well Sanjeev, there have been reports like that (if not for Doordarshan), for example about the No Kings protests in the US.