meowmeowmeowmeow

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.

so much cheap generic medication. reverse engineering compounds would be even more financially profitable.

fewer people dead of vaccine preventable illnesses in the global south bc the greatest barrier to distributing some vaccines like hpv is their ip

plant seeds and grafts that come from the plants instead of licensing them. don't invest so much in preventing cross contamination. more localised experimental breeding.

library of the world: every book and journal article in the world could be digitised and be searchable for every person in the world to read regardless of where they live. cheap reprint runs and local translations everywhere.

an online interface where every citation could actually lead to the text in question

freedom from the hell that is DRM software

everytime someone reverse engineered your shitty proprietary software we would all be freed from it instead of them getting DMCA'd

so much hardware would be opened up & therefore made so much cooler.

so many more songs that riff off and sample and interpolate shit from this decade instead of like 70 years ago and more analysis of music that didn't keep getting nuked off the internet

preserving movies and tv shows and games as long as someone, somewhere has the desire to host them

just go publish your fanfic/art/vid as is instead of all us pretending it isn't fanwork or begging the corporation for mercy / licensing

lawyers. im getting chills just

imagining it.

“people who can afford homes —“ are typically 400-600k in debt for them. also if “can own your own home” is your threshold for the rich you are contemplating eating, i think you are genuinely stupid

meanwhile, 92% come from pressure groups and government officials?

oh, oh, and 40% of alllll the books these groups want to ban are stories of racialized and/or queer people?

and hey wouldn't ya know? alllll of these numbers skyrocketed after 2020, with the global rise in fascist ideologies.

Red states start trying to ban anything mentioning CRT, next thing you know, Republican candidates are promising to ban books in their donor emails and suddenly a whole political apparatus spins up around censoring books in libraries.

“Native people used to live in this National Park” No. They still do.

“Native people used to tell these stories-” No. They still do.

“Native people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-” No. They still do.

to live in this National

Park” No. They still do.