Assume a monkey is a rigid body of mass m (THG #11 of 20)
Ignore air resistance and friction.
Dear reader:
Welcome to another new edition of The Hindustan Grimes, where the news is always brand new, but the stories are as old as always.
As we had announced last week, we're on Instagram! Check us out, and follow us if you use the gram.
This week, we bring you a bombshell expose on the unholy nexus between coaching corporations and the news media. We also interview WhatsApp COO Mr. Ghosh on WhatsApp's revamped UI and feature set, scheduled to be release soon.
Yours explosively,
momo & eggsy
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WhatsApp introduces new features for the tone deaf
Applications open for translator to aid in interview with Telegram CEO
Gokak/Gurugram, March 2021: Following the recent promising results in beta testing, Whatsapp India is set to launch a swathe of new features in the market. In an exclusive interview with The Hindustan Grimes, WhatsApp India's Chief of Operations, Mr. Shabdh Ghosh, makes some groundbreaking announcements.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and abridged for brevity.
It seems that WhatsApp as a whole is having a new moment. You're the old player in a market where customers seem to be getting disillusioned. What changes are you bringing to your product, and likely, to the other products in the market?
Yes. We have a range of changes that we've tried and tested in the beta program and are ready to bring to the market. Our top new feature is the tone-aid for the emotionally challenged community and for just about anyone who's just tired of figuring out signals.
So many companies are now vying to increase everyone's IQ, we thought we'd try and augment everyone's EQ instead. Tone-aid makes it really easy to read the tone of the conversation, be it a sarcastic friend, a depressed cousin, or a bewildering group chat. WhatsApp will automatically set the background of the chat to a different colour to indicate the mood of the texts.
This is going to be a game changer and help us keep our customers happy, or sad, or respectful, or whatever the emotion.
Wait! Doesn't that void the end-to-end encryption of the messages?
People are now disillusioned about the end-to-end anyway. They know the reality. So our team thought we might as well try to roll out new features to aid our customers. We want to give our customers the best features they deserve. For free.
Hmm. We at the Grimes are agog to see how the customers will see this rollout. Are you at all concerned about your more privacy-focused competitors like Telegram and Signal?
Nah. It's all just a fad. We saw their numbers increase in January and then fall again in February. Our numbers have stayed steady. The fad will pass. We're not worried.
Right. So it would appear that the customers are not really concerned about their privacy at all. Is that so?
Yes. That's what we saw.
Last month we tried out a new feature in beta where our AI helps you synthesise replies based on the detected or a custom chosen sentiment. Most of our beta testers loved it. They loved that we could help them create funny replies based on who they were talking to, instantaneously. It just works so great.
You say most of them liked. So there were people who didn't like it. What do you expect went wrong there?
Oh, there were just a few mishaps. Sometimes stubby fingered customers find it hard to click on the right options in our UI. It can't be helped. This one time clicking on the wrong custom sentiment resulted in an inappropriate situation. One of our betas ended up sending "Yo momma so old, she fukin' died" instead of condolences, on hearing their boss' mother passing away.
Oof. That is horrible. That seems like a major oversight on the part of your te—
No. No. No. It wasn't really a big problem. The beta contacted us quickly, so we were able to unsend that message and not leave a trace.
On the flip side, some other betas heard of the story and requested an option where the AI would synthesize replies based on an arbitrary sentiment. They want a random mode.
And will you be acquiescing?
Of course. Who are we to deny what our customers want. And anyway it was an easy modification to our powerful AI. It can track the mood of the conversations while also supplementing those inferences with precise knowledge of the sender's behaviour and cycles. It can track the changes with respect to diurnal or nocturnal cycles, moon cycles, and even seasons and semesters.
Woah! It seems like you are ready to bring the AI revolution to messaging. Do you expect the market to take in these changes easily?
There will always be friction. But if we bring the changes quickly, it will quickly go from the normal to a new normal and it'll all be alright.
We're not nearly done with the changes anyway. Our latest beta test was automated replies. It turned out that "I am fine mom." and "Happy b'day ...!" turned out to be the most used auto-replies. We think this is going to be a big hit too.
Mr. Shabdh Ghosh explained more planned features set to be released on April 1st. A more detailed transcript of the interview can be found here.
Teachers To Teach Only 50% Syllabus This Year
Karnataka HC orders release of prisoners at half term
Bengaluru, March 2021: Private school teachers in the Bengaluru Urban district have been instructed by their managements to halt teaching at 50% of the syllabus to show their displeasure at the government's order to slash tuition fees by 50%.
On January 30th, the Karnataka government came out with an order to slash all private school tuition fees by 30%, in order to ease the burden on pandemic-affected parents. While parents were relieved, school managements were irked.
Schools have claimed that this fee cut will render them unable to pay their teachers. Parents are unanimous in their dismissal of this argument. They claim that the schools have already fired many teachers and cut the salaries of the rest severely, citing the pandemic.
On February 23rd, after no rollback of the fee slash order, Karnataka Private School Managements, Teaching, and Non-Teaching Staff Coordination Committee^ (KPMTCC), representing all the private schools protested by taking out a march from the Central Railway Station to Freedom Park. Over 25,000, wiling and unwilling, teaching and non-teaching staff participated in the protest.
"It is difficult for school managements to sustain the operations of the school, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, if fees are slashed," said Bangalore International Public School Trustee, Mr. K D Fiddler. "The objective of the protest is the financial distress of private education institutions and their managements. I might have to liquidise some offshore investments to pay for the new Lamborghini Sian if parents don't pay all of the school fees."
Vexed by the pettiness of school managements, the Karnataka government has doubled down on their decision. On March 3rd, the government announced that schools wouldn't be allowed to collect more than 50% of the tuition fees, to the jubilation of all parents.
Yesterday, in this latest exchange between private educational institutions and the government, KPMTCC has instructed all school managements to ensure that their school teachers only teach 50% of the syllabus to the students.
At same time, the Karnataka Private Schools’ Parents’ Associations’ Coordination Committee^ (KPSPACC) have called this a spiteful move on the part of the schools and have demanded the government to stop them. The KPSPACC warns that failure to stop the move would result in protest marches in the city and a possible Karnataka Bandh next week.
^Both these committees are real. Google them.
Media Malpractice Exposed
The India Grimes sues The Hindustan Grimes for copyright infringement
Chennai, March 2021: The Hindustan Grimes conducted an extensive investigation over the last four months on certain unsavoury alliances between members of the media and certain coaching corporations. We've only included the specifics that our in house legal counsel approved for publication, and hence, fresh stories will be published as we vet and clear the remaining information we have obtained.
The India Grimes^ is considered to be one of the oldest dailies in India, after The Hindu and two others. The paper has, over the last six months, been publishing 'public interest' stories detailing the lives of teachers and students at FIITJEE, and praising their modern methods of teaching. One of the articles detailed the companion monkeys professors used to teach physics. The trained monkeys are made to attempt different stunts to teach physics concepts to the students. For example, a monkey is made to hang from a rod and swing from a pendulum, and students are expected to calculate the time period and verify it*.
The Hindustan Grimes was able to prove that The India Grimes was getting paid between Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 5,00,00 for each public interest column, depending on the visibility of the column. There were two signals used to confirm when the piece will appear in the paper the next day. First, a box of 'complementary' bananas is sent to FIITJEE Chennai's corporate office. Then, at 5 pm, a man in an all black attire; a trench coat and a hat stands on the curb outside the FIITJEE corporate office for 5 minutes while eating a banana. The banana box is then thrown into a dumpster in an adjacent blind street when the street is deserted. The man in the black trench coat collects the box, with the cash inside. We later identified the man in the trench coat as Mr. Maneesh K. Bandar, a low level executive with The India Grimes^.
Sadly, this culture of planted stories runs through other news bodies as well, sullying the name of good journalism. The Narayana and Chaitanya Schools have been engaging in a similar arrangement with GrimesNow, a highly rated television channel in Andhra Pradesh, with many of these 'public interest' stories being aired during their prime time news hour.
Firstly, the news channel has aired stories with false numbers. For instance, a claim was made that both the schools have a 90% IIT entrance rate. This was false, as this number was arrived upon by dividing the total number of IIT entrants across all batches by the number of students in the joint Chaina batch alone. They were also deflating the number of suicides on campus, without accounting for confounders such as COVID.
This collaboration comes after previous Chaina batch students who got into IIT were approached by Boost for a sponsorship deal, with the students claiming that "Boost is the secret of my energy." Registrations plummeted across both schools soon after, causing them to turn to such partnerships to boost registrations to pre-boost levels. The campaign seems to have been a success.
In the meantime, Byju's revenue has grown as WhiteHat Jr. has gained an unequaled popularity. Just recently, Byju's confirmed in a tweet that 9 year old Navumra Baccha had been given a pre-placement offer by Google for an annual salary of 13 billion USD, equivalent to 10% of the market capitalisation of Alphabet, Inc., the parent corporation of Google. This case is not an outlier, but seems to be representative of all their students, peer reviewed studies confirm [1]. Byju's stands poised to become the dominant competent player in Indian education and Edtech, and seems to be the only ethical player in the game. Byju's is offering a flat 80% off on all new applications across their coaching centres. To avail this offer, use the code THEHINDUSTANGRIMES at https://byjus.com/apply.
^The India Grimes is in no way affiliated with The Hindustan Grimes.
*No monkeys are harmed in the making of physics lessons: FIITJEE legal team.
[1] Source
The Grimes’ Definition of the Week
Source: The friend you approach when you are missing an ingredient for your brownie cake. Commonly confused with whistleblower.
Namaskara,
momo & eggsy