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Fruit Roll Ups

Ingredients

5 cups fruit strawberries, apricots, peaches,

silicone mat

baking sheet

fine mesh strainer optional

Instructions

Blend fruit together until very smooth. Pour into a fine mesh strainer if you would like to remove seeds.

Line a baking sheet with a silicone mat. Preheat oven to 200 degrees F. Pour mixture onto mat, and spread very even with a spatula. Leave mixture at least 1/4 inch thick, especially watching the edges.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

for those who don't know, schools in india have students take these major exams in class 10 and class 12 called 'boards' which act as a final exam. boards are nation-wide, and every single student of class 10 and 12 is required to give them, and they're given the same paper, depending on which board your school is under.

now, just this year, class 12 students under the CBSE board had their papers checked by a new system called the on-screen marking (OSM) system. as the name suggests, the papers are scanned and the teachers check the papers of all these students through the scans. the problem? the scans were shitty. some students reported that the scans of papers under their name weren't theirs, but someone else's paper. students reported that their scans were blurry, pages were missing, and some didn't even have a scan. not just that, but the officials incharge of all this refused to explain how things like this happened! heck, even the teachers checking the papers complained about this.

this is the exam students give before entering college. this is the exam that could potentially get them a seat in a college. these are the marks that their future depends upon. and this is how it's going away — by unprofessionalism.

now, as a person from manipur, i'd like to truly emphasise how shitty it was, and still is.

the manipur conflict began in 2023 and still has not been resolved. those displaced families? still displaced. villages, schools and churches have been burnt down and the government did not care for it. mass shootings, killing of people, rape and so much more happened that if I listed all of it here it would be too long. I am lucky enough that my hometown was left unscathed but so many of my manipuri friends had to watch as their villages burnt down and their ancestral homes got wiped away. the conflict was between tribals and non-tribals, and tribals have had the bear the brunt of it. the state of manipur is now divided, and tribals can't even pass through the non-tribal regions because they fear and know that they could be killed.

what's worse is that the only airport of manipur is located in a non-tribal region— leaving us tribals to have to find other ways to just be able to visit home and family. those in northern manipur go from nagaland, while those in the south go from mizoram. the roads to manipur from both those states are not the safest, and in the beginning of the conflict we had to hear so many people dying on the way because of the unsafe roads. think of that— we couldn't even go home without risking our lives.