Notes of Nagesh

  Century-old and Unaccountable: The Case for Registering the RSS India's most powerful civil organisation cloaks itself in informality. A democracy that tolerates such opacity from an entity of such influence is only asking for trouble. HYDERABAD  ·  Jun 18, 2026 There is a reliable Indian tradition of powerful organisations invoking ancient precedent to escape modern accountability. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which celebrated its centenary last year, has mastered this art. Asked why it remains unregistered under any Indian law, its chief, Mohan Bhagwat, replied with a question of his own: should the RSS have registered with the British, against whom its founder was fighting? The rhetorical flair is admirable. The logic is embarrassing. India has been a sovereign republic for 77 years. That is a long time to forget to fill out the paperwork. The RSS occupies a position in Indian public life without parallel. It claims millions of participants, operates tens of thou...

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & HIGHER EDUCATION The Empty Classroom When students outsource learning to AI and companies cut the engineers who know better, both ends of the talent pipeline fray at once. India is not watching from a safe distance. Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan At the University of California, Berkeley, something unremarkable happened in spring 2026: a professor held office hours. The unremarkable part was that nobody came. Dan Garcia, who teaches CS 10, a broad introductory computing course popularly called “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” found his calendar conspicuously clear at the very moment his gradebook became conspicuously alarming. Of the students who sat CS 10’s final examination, 35.3% received an F—five times the historical norm of roughly 7%. Two other courses in Berkeley’s elite Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department suffered similarly: 10.6% of CS 61A students failed, and 16.8% of those in EECS 127, an upper-division optimi...

  Spies in the Classroom: How Universities Are Training the Next Generation of Intelligence Officers Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan From the Paris suburbs to the banks of the Thames, a quiet revolution is reshaping how democratic nations develop their intelligence professionals. The Campus That Trains Spies On a grey morning on the outskirts of Paris, a university professor takes attendance. It is, by most appearances, an ordinary ritual — except that several names on his list are almost certainly false. Professor Xavier Crettiez, a researcher specialising in jihadism at Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has grown accustomed to the uncertainty. "I rarely know the intelligence agents' backgrounds when they are sent on the course," he says, "and I doubt the names I'm given are genuine anyway." Welcome to France's so-called 'School for Spies': the Diplôme sur le Renseignement et les Menaces Globales — the Diploma on Intelligence and Global Threat...

CHUPPALA NAGESH BHUSHAN An overview of  Mark Bennetts' book,  The Descent , which recounts his twenty-five-year journey as a witness to  Russia’s gradual transformation into a totalitarian state  under Vladimir Putin. Through interviews and personal memoirs, Bennetts explores how early political opportunities to  exclude former KGB officers from power  were missed, ultimately allowing the security services to capture the Kremlin. The narrative examines the  psychological impact of aggressive state propaganda , describing how it disorientated the Russian public and cultivated a culture that increasingly embraced  violence and the occult . The text highlights key turning points, such as the  annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine , which Bennetts views as the culmination of a "spiral into madness." Ultimately, the sources reflect on the  deeply ingrained nature of state-sponsored torture  and the tragic erosion of the brief ...

Science & Technology The Hard Problem Gets Harder After decades of neuroscience, the mystery of consciousness is not shrinking. It is expanding — into plants, into bodies, into the cosmos itself chuppala nagesh bhushan |  15th June 2025 T HERE is a peculiar irony at the heart of consciousness research. The thing being studied — the felt quality of inner experience — is the only phenomenon in the universe of which every human being has direct, first-person knowledge. And yet, after thirty years of concerted scientific effort, the mystery of consciousness has not diminished. It has deepened. This is the central tension of "A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness", a new book by the science writer Michael Pollan, better known for his investigations into food and, more recently, psychedelics. The book is an ambitious tour through the latest theories of mind — from neural workspace models to panpsychism — and Mr Pollan arrives at its end, if anythin...