Personal Weblog of Deepak Vasudevan

♻️ THE HIDDEN ENVIRONMENTAL COST OF TELECOM FRAUD We talk about fighting spam calls and scam operations, but here's something nobody discusses: the environmental nightmare hiding in your drawer. THE PROBLEM WE DON'T SEE Every day in India, thousands of SIM cards are: Issued to scammers using fake IDs Used for fraud, spam calls, and deepfake voice scams Discarded when reported and blocked Replaced with fresh SIM cards to continue operations And every single one is made of non-biodegradable plastic that takes 500+ years to decompose. THE MATH IS ALARMING India has 1+ billion mobile connections ️ Millions of SIM cards discarded annually ♻️ Almost ZERO recycling infrastructure for them Each SIM = PVC plastic + metals sitting in landfills forever Scam operations amplify this exponentially. When we report fraudulent numbers to TRAI/DND/Chakshu, those SIM cards get blocked. Great for security. Terrible for the environment. The scammers?...

Fingers Crossed. What Could Be A year after Ishani’s marriage , the household that inspired our tale seems to be stirring again. The silence of the past months has given way to faint echoes of midnight conversations—hushed voices that fall quiet whenever footsteps approach. Something is brewing, though no one dares to speak of it openly. The Setup The Sisters’ Legacy : Part I revealed the tragic falls of two sisters. Part II traced the inheritance that shifted hands in the aftermath. The New Chapter : Now, whispers suggest that the story is far from over. Ishani’s marriage anniversary has become the backdrop for clandestine plotting. The Midnight Conversations Suspicious Timing : Conversations begin after midnight, when the rest of the neighbourhood sleeps. Sudden Silence : Whenever someone crosses near, the voices vanish, leaving only the tension of secrets. Possible Motives : Are they discussing hidden wills, property ...

In Defense of Our Street Dogs: Building Communities Through Compassion The debate around street dogs often gets framed as a binary choice between public safety and animal welfare. But this framing misses something fundamental: the most successful solutions emerge when we recognize that these goals aren't opposing forces—they're interconnected parts of building truly livable neighborhoods. The Real Issue Isn't the Dogs Street dogs exist because of us. They thrive where we create opportunity—in our unsecured garbage, our food scraps, our inconsistent practices. The dogs are simply adapting to the environment we've created. Blaming them is like blaming a river for flowing downhill. When we see dogs gathering at certain corners or becoming territorial, we're witnessing a symptom, not a cause. The real question is: what are we doing that's attracting and sustaining them there?   What Compassionate Management Looks Like The most effective programs world...

Festival of Widows: A Satirical Chronicle The Crocodile Tears Era Once upon a time, when the Opposition Orators' Guild warmed opposition benches, their most thunderous voice wept for the toddy menace. With theatrical pauses and glistening eyes, they mourned the tragic multiplication of "young widows" across the land. Each speech was a masterclass in compassion—captured on camera, circulated in pamphlets, immortalized in promises. The Power Switch Fast forward to 2021. The tears evaporated overnight. In their place: a meticulously planned archipelago of state-run liquor counters. What was once a menace became a revenue model. What was once tragedy became target. Every festival now doubles as a sales opportunity—temple fairs, harvest celebrations, pilgrimage routes. The Kallakurichi tragedy offered a grim audit: the widow-making infrastructure hadn't been dismantled. It had merely been modernized, monetized, and brought under government efficiency standards. ...

The Sovereign's Classroom: Lessons from the "Three Graduates," and Humanity's Lingering Test Samayapuram, Jan 25, 2026 – We once meditated on the fierce, Thousand-Eyed form of Samayapuram Maha Mariamman, invoking Her Anantadrushti to shield the innocent from a "Tsunami of Adharma." We sought a divine shield for our furry companions, a powerful counter to humanity's growing arrogance and encroachment. Now, as the calendar turns to early 2026, it appears our prayers have been answered—not with a gentle whisper, but with a robust, biological curriculum delivered in the Mother's own hand.   The divine pedagogy is never subtle when the students are obstinate. The Mother's Graduates: A Trinity of Reckoning The Mother's "laboratories" have indeed graduated their first teachers. Not one, but three distinct forces are now in active deployment, each a precision instrument calibrated to expose a different fracture in humanity's...

  Bus Day — When College Reopens and Chaos Climbs the Roof The Scene: It's June. The monsoon hasn't quite arrived, but something else has—thousands of college students, fresh from summer break, bursting with pent-up energy and questionable judgment. Welcome to Bus Day , Chennai's unofficial festival of vehicular anarchy. The Ritual: Picture this: an MTC bus, meant for 40 seated passengers, now carrying 80—half of them on the outside . Students cling to window bars like primates reclaiming their ancestral trees. Others perch atop the roof, waving college flags as if they've conquered Everest. The bus lurches forward, honking helplessly, driven by a conductor who's long given up on fare collection and now just prays for survival. The Participants: Pachaiyappa's and Presidency students are the usual suspects, though every college sends its delegates. Freshmen prove their mettle by dangling from footboards. Seniors orchestrate the chaos from strategic va...

When LinkedIn Made Me Practice What I Was Preaching Against I just wrote a post about the "Ambujam Effect"—how companies mimic each other's layoffs not out of necessity, but performance. How executives cut jobs to signal efficiency to Wall Street, even while posting record profits. Then LinkedIn told me my post was 1,018 characters too long. The First Round of Cuts I had to decide: Which sentences were "essential"? Which examples could I afford to lose? Which explanatory phrases were just "nice to have"? I made the cuts. Painful, but necessary to meet the platform's arbitrary limit. The Second Round Then LinkedIn came back: "Still 18 characters over the limit." Eighteen characters. Not a paragraph. Not even a full sentence. Just... a bit more efficiency needed. The Irony Wasn't Lost Here I was, writing about how layoffs are often driven by arbitrary metrics rather than genuine need—and I was being forced to enact t...

The 'Ambujam Effect': Why Corporate Layoffs Are Less About Need and More About Imitation and Drama When one major tech company announces layoffs, a strange inevitability sets in. Soon after, another, and then another, follows suit—often without a visible, corresponding collapse in their own financial reports. It's a phenomenon perfectly captured by the Tamil lyric: "Aduthaathu Ambujatha Paarthelala Ava Aathukarar Konjurarathe Kettala..." (roughly: Did you see what Ambujam’s neighbor did? Did you hear what her husband bought?). It's the competitive, consumerist urge to mimic one's peers, but in the corporate world, the item being copied is a mass workforce reduction. This is the Layoff Contagion, and it proves that the current wave of cuts is less about solvency and more about herd mentality and financial performance art. 1. The Contagion: Why the Herd Moves Together The idea that thousands of companies independently realize they need the exact same cut...

Giving Voice to the Voiceless A Call for AI Research in Animal Communication An open letter to the world’s leading AI research teams on why decoding animal language could be the next great frontier of empathy and science. To the Research Teams at Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity and xAI I write to you not as a scientist or technologist, but as someone who has spent thousands of hours listening—truly listening—to the dogs in my life. In those hours of barks, whines, tail wags, and sighs, I’ve learned something profound: animals are not voiceless. We simply haven’t learned their language yet. The Opportunity Before Us Your organizations are pioneering the most advanced language models humanity has ever created. You’ve taught machines to understand and generate human language with remarkable sophistication. But there’s another frontier that remains largely unexplored: the languages of the animals who share our world. Imagine a future where: A ...