Notes of Nagesh

  By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A trilateral defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey looks impressive on paper. Six months of evidence suggest something narrower, and more interesting, than a new NATO WHEN THREE MEN shook hands at Al-Safa Palace on August 7th, the language they signed up to was unambiguous: an armed attack on any one of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Turkey "shall be regarded as an attack against them all." That formula, lifted almost verbatim from Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, was enough to send analysts reaching for maps and headline writers reaching for "NATO of the Muslim world." Combined, the three signatories field 1.4m active troops, 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks and 340-odd naval vessels, backed by $124.4bn in annual defence spending and, in Pakistan, the only nuclear arsenal in the Islamic world. Six months on, the more useful question is not what the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement says, but what it does. The evidence, patchy ...

By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan The old Silicon Valley joke that “AI” stood for “Actually Indians” is colliding with reality. Tasks that once kept armies of coders and process workers busy in Bangalore and Hyderabad are exactly the ones generative AI handles best. Why it matters: India’s IT services sector employs more than 5 million people, generates over $300 billion in revenue, and remains one of the country’s biggest sources of exports and middle-class jobs. A sharp disruption would ripple through the economy. The big picture: For decades, Indian firms thrived on labor arbitrage — delivering software development, testing, and routine back-office work (payroll, accounting, support) at lower cost. Those categories are now highly automatable. Coding assistants write and debug code. AI agents handle repetitive business processes. The logical fear: mass job losses and a hit to India’s growth model. What we’re seeing instead (as of mid-2026): Industry revenue is still growing...

By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A judge wants law schools to teach the Vedas alongside the constitution. That is a bigger ask than it sounds INDIA'S SUPREME COURT likes anniversaries. For its 75th, in April 2025, it unveiled a new statue of Lady Justice: sari instead of toga, a book instead of a sword, eyes uncovered rather than blindfolded. At the same event, at a legal conclave hosted by the National Law Institute University in Bhopal, Justice Pankaj Mithal, a sitting judge of the court, went further. Law schools, he argued, should formally teach the Vedas, the Smritis, the Arthashastra, the Manusmriti, the Buddhist Dhammas and the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as sources of legal reasoning, under a course titled something like "Dharma and Indian Legal Thought." The constitution, he suggested, should not be the only book Lady Justice holds. The Gita, the Vedas and the Puranas ought to join it. Judges opining on curriculum design is unusual enough. What makes the ...

 By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan The Vanishing Translator-Why We Need Science Writing for the Common Person Now More Than Ever Somewhere between the laboratory and the living room, something essential keeps getting lost. A study gets published. Its findings are hedged, qualified, and buried in statistical caveats that took the researchers years to earn the right to make. By the time it reaches the public, it has often been stripped of every nuance that made it honest — reduced to a headline, a meme, or a WhatsApp forward that says either "Scientists Prove X Cures Everything" or "Scientists Admit They Were Wrong All Along." Neither is true. Both spread faster than the truth ever could. This is not a new problem. But it has never been more urgent than it is right now. The Widening Gap Science today moves at a pace no previous generation has witnessed. A single year now produces more peer-reviewed research than entire decades once did. Fields like genomics, climate ...

  By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A judge's insult, a hunger strike and 70 days of Instagram Reels have forced Narendra Modi into his sharpest capitulation in a quarter-century of power ON JULY 25th Dharmendra Pradhan, India's education minister since 2021 and a fixture of Narendra Modi's cabinet since 2014, posted his resignation letter on X. He thanked the prime minister, expressed sympathy for "the aspirations, feelings and legitimate expectations of the country's youth" and left office. Within hours, thousands of protesters camped at Jantar Mantar, a patch of central Delhi that has hosted more failed sit-ins than most Indians can count, were celebrating what they called a "new birthday" for Indian democracy. That they had a point owes less to the opposition parties that have spent a decade failing to lay a glove on Mr Modi than to a social-media account named, with deliberate crudeness, after a cockroach. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) is not a p...

  By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan The Republic of Ribbons India has perfected the art of building things nobody uses A RAILWAY STATION in Bhopal has spent three years waiting for a train the way some men wait for a bus that was cancelled in a timetable nobody bothered to publish. The Nishtapura station has platforms, a foot-over-bridge and lighting fit for a much busier life. It has never had a passenger. Locals have found a use for it anyway: as a backdrop for film shoots, the closest thing to a plot this station will ever host. Nishtapura is not an anomaly. It is a species. Call it Ghost Infrastructure: concrete, steel and taxpayer rupees assembled into the shape of progress, then left to stand there, looking the part, doing nothing. India builds these with a fluency that would be admirable if it were not so expensive. The formula is reliable. A minister arrives, a ribbon is cut, a drone films the ribbon being cut, and then everyone goes home—the minister to the next ribbon, the...