Notes of Nagesh

  The former election commissioner's new book is a rigorous study on family planning in India, specifically among Indian Muslims An infant girl from Andhra Pradesh hugs her mother (Tim Gainey / Alamy Stock Photo) By  Omkar Khandekar LAST PUBLISHED https://tcpd.ashoka.edu.in/sy-quraishi-debunks-the-myth-of-indias-rising-muslim-population  07.02.2021   |   07:00 AM IST SOURCE : https://tcpd.ashoka.edu.in/sy-quraishi-debunks-the-myth-of-indias-rising-muslim-population Growing up, SY Quraishi, like many people around him, thought Islam was against family planning. “We’d heard this as long as I can remember—that Muslims produce too many children. For want of contrary information, I believed it too," the former chief election commissioner recalls, speaking about his new book  The Population Myth  on a Zoom call. In 1994, the India chapter of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) approached him to write a strategy paper on the issue. It was an unusual re...

In the arid heart of southern Yemen, the oil‑rich governorate of Hadramaut is once again becoming a flashpoint, not because of a resurgence of al‑Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) but due to a subtle yet potent rivalry between two of the Gulf’s most powerful patrons: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have quietly begun to arm and mobilise local militias, a development that analysts describe as putting the region “on the brink of war”. The stakes are high. Hadramaut produces roughly eighty thousand barrels of crude a day, a lifeline for a country whose overall output has been crippled by a decade of conflict. Moreover, the governorate straddles the Bab al‑Mandab, the narrow strait that links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, a chokepoint through which a significant share of the world’s oil passes. Any disruption there reverberates far beyond Yemen’s battered borders. A rivalry reborn The Saudi‑UAE partnership that underpinned the anti‑Houthi coaliti...

 How Self‑Attention Revolutionized Language AI: A Layperson’s Guide to “Attention Is All You Need” . Picture :Ashish Vaswani by Sora In the ever‑accelerating race to make machines understand human language, a modest‑looking paper by Ashish Vaswani et al  published in 2017 set off a quiet revolution. Its title, Attention Is All You Need , reads like a mantra for the over‑caffeinated data scientist, yet the claim it makes is anything but trivial: the authors argue that a single architectural principle—self‑attention—can replace the cumbersome, sequential machinery that had dominated natural‑language processing for years. Everyday Analogy Picture a classroom where a teacher asks a question. Instead of waiting for each student to raise their hand one after another, every student simultaneously whispers their thoughts to everyone else. Each student then decides which whispers matter most for answering the teacher’s question. The class reaches the answer much faster and with more in...

In the past decade India has moved from being a peripheral consumer of artificial‑intelligence (AI) technology to a genuine engine of innovation. The country’s contribution is now evident across the full spectrum of the field – from the mathematics that underpins deep learning to the deployment of models that diagnose disease in remote villages. While the United States and China still dominate the headline‑grabbing breakthroughs, a closer look reveals a vibrant ecosystem of universities, government laboratories and start‑ups that is reshaping AI on its own terms. A foundation built on theory The first wave of Indian influence was scholarly rather than commercial. Researchers at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) produced a steady stream of papers on optimisation, Bayesian inference and generative models. Notable among them is the work of Dr Soumith Chintala at Microsoft Research India, who helped refine the training tricks that made Ge...

A world model in artificial intelligence is a neural network or generative system that learns an internal, compressed representation (or simulation) of the real world or an environment. It captures the underlying dynamics — including physics, spatial relationships, object interactions, causality, and how states evolve over time given actions or events. Instead of just reacting to inputs or memorizing patterns, the AI uses this model to predict future states , simulate "what-if" scenarios, and plan actions effectively. This concept dates back to early reinforcement learning research (e.g., the 2018 "World Models" paper by Ha and Schmidhuber), but it has surged in popularity since 2024–2025 as a key pathway toward more capable, human-like AI. Yann LeCun (Meta's Chief AI Scientist) has called world models the critical missing piece for achieving human-level intelligence, enabling AI to reason about the physical world the way humans do with mental models. Key chara...

The imminent “freeze‑breaker” The Constitution’s Article 82 mandates a census‑driven delimitation of Lok Sabha and state‑assembly constituencies every ten years. In 2002 Parliament froze the exercise, arguing that rapid population growth in the north would give those states disproportionate parliamentary weight. The freeze is scheduled to lapse on  31 December 2025 , meaning that the 2021 Census (the most recent complete count) will become the basis for the next round of constituency re‑allocation in  2026 . On paper the principle is simple: each MP should represent roughly the same number of citizens. In practice, the exercise threatens to cement a demographic imbalance that has been building for decades. The arithmetic of inequality State 2021 Census population Seats in Lok Sabha (current) Projected seats after 2026 delimitation* Uttar Pradesh 240 m 80 95‑100 Bihar 124 m 40 48‑52 Maharashtra 126 m 48 45‑48 Karnataka 71 m 28 24‑26 Kerala 35 m 20 14‑16 Tamil Nadu 72 m 39 34‑36...