Flying taxis, media madness, and homecoming
and a tiny state with a big heart!
Hello DoorDesi,
I am writing this on Thursday night instead of my usual Saturday morning ritual. Why, you ask? Because I am coming home and will be on my way home when this reaches you. I am slowly working my way towards a short vacation (we still have a couple more issues to go before I call it a year) and while I do that I want to thank you. I want to thank you for coming along with us. For being a DoorDesi. For building this community ground up. More on that in the next few editions.
For now, enjoy the wild ride that is the news cycle this week - from voter panic to flying taxi, from fake news to e-passports, and a little bit about a place I call home.
Have a great week ahead, folks!
Just the gist
🔗The race to make your vote count
Chennai is in peak pre-election anxiety mode, and the Greater Chennai Corporation has decided to step in before half the city spirals into “Will I lose my vote?” panic. From November 18 to 25, voter help centres will operate across 947 polling stations to guide people through the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Think of it as customer service for democracy. And if we are good at anything as a country it is customer service. Although the exact opposite is true for bureaucracy so it could go eitherway I guess.
The centres will help voters fill out SIR forms, verify details, and even dig up family information from the 2005 electoral roll. Officials will also check documents, spot errors, and tell you if you have your documents in order.
Political party polling agents are playing a key role in keeping the process smooth, but the Commissioner has a simple request for everyone else: please show up. Use the help centres, update your details, and make sure your vote stays yours.
➡️ Nationally, this process is ongoing for everyone until Dec 9, and if you miss that there will be dates released in the future. Here is how to do it online: https://www.creditmantri.com/article-how-to-fill-sir-form-online/
🔗 Indian mainstream media as showbiz
Indian news channels went into full thriller-mode this week after an undated video of Red Fort blast accused Dr Umar Nabi surfaced online. Within hours, studios were running “body-language decoding” sessions, “psychological profiles” based on unnamed sources and enough speculation to power an entire season of Crime Patrol. Only later did the Information and Broadcasting Ministry step in with an advisory asking channels to please stop airing sensitive material that could incite violence or help extremists.
By then, the damage was done. CNN News18 diagnosed Umar with everything from schizophrenia to “genetic issues” before calling him rational enough to carry out an attack. India Today declared itself the first to bring viewers the clip and jumped straight into terror modules, Hamas links and “calm posture analysis”. Aaj Tak even aired an AI-generated video of Umar plotting over a map. Times Now, NDTV and Republic added their own decoding specials.
It was all heat, little light and a reminder that sensationalism outruns verification.
➡️ So what can we do? The season of giving is here. Donate whatever amount you can to a news website you trust.
Andhra Pradesh just announced something straight out of a sci-fi movie and slightly more exciting than another Vijay Deverakonda launch announcement. The state has signed a pact with Bengaluru-based Sarla Aviation to build India’s largest electric air taxi factory in Anantapur. Yes, air taxis. Actual flying ones.
Sarla’s “Sky Factory” will sit on 150 acres, house research labs, production lines and a two kilometre runway, and eventually expand to 500 acres. The company plans to build six-seater electric aircraft that take off vertically, hover, cruise and ideally do not make you question your life choices mid-air. Testing begins in 2027, commercial production in 2029.
Once fully operational, the campus could manufacture up to 1,000 eVTOL aircraft a year, including Sarla’s hybrid VTOL platform named Shunya. Andhra Pradesh is pitching itself as the country’s next aviation hub, backed by billions in new investments for drones, waterways, flight training and even a yacht yard.
➡️ Wondering what to brag about next when someone says India is a poor country? Well, not its press freedom it seems. So I guess let’s hope this works out.
Since May 2025, India has issued more than 80 lakh e-passports, making every new or renewed passport a chipped, RFID-enabled upgrade. Think of it as your old passport, but now it has a tiny brain. (Why is my brain replaying videos of mainstream news reporters back in 2018 talking about chipped currencies :D)
The chip stores demographic and biometric information in read-only format, is built on an indigenous operating system, and activates only when machine-read, so it cannot be tracked in the wild. The new system matches live biometrics instantly, which makes impersonation nearly impossible and jugaad significantly harder.
Processing times at counters have dropped, documentation has reduced, and more than 100 countries can now read e-passports, which means faster immigration for Indian travellers. All old passports remain valid until 2035, so no rush to replace yours unless you really want the shiny new toy.
➡️ Also coming soon: expiry alerts by SMS and an expanded Trusted Traveller Programme. India’s passport game just levelled up.
Getting to know the nation that is
🔗The land of forest, resilience, and hope
Jharkhand turned twenty five this week, and like many twenty five year olds, it is still figuring out what it wants to be when it is older. Born on Birsa Munda’s birthday and built on the promise of “our land, our rule”, the state was meant to protect Adivasi identity, land and resources. The dream is clear. The delivery, less so.
The movement for Jharkhand was a century in the making, shaped by rebellions, student groups, Jaipal Singh Munda’s charisma and Shibu Soren’s firebrand organising. When the state was finally carved out of Bihar in 2000, it inherited minerals, industries, and enormous expectations.
It also inherited problems. Poverty, low literacy, bad infrastructure and political instability have kept Jharkhand from benefitting fully from its wealth. Migration remains a lifeline, often at great risk. As scholars point out, the original promise of freedom from exploitation still feels incomplete.
Twenty five years later, Jharkhand has identity. Now it needs opportunity.
💌I was born in Jharkhand when it was still Bihar in a small town called Jamshedpur. Jharkhand, a state most Indians can’t point at on the map, has had a warm place in my heart. It has been home although I have spent most of my life away from it. There is so much richness of culture, history, and politics in this tiny slice of the country. From being one of the highest woodland and forest cover in India to being India’s supplier of most minerals to being the centre of the naxal insurgency, this tiny region has shaped a lot of what is modern India.
Read with me
🔗The AI of the future is local
India’s AI boom is on an unexpected side quest: saving languages that Silicon Valley barely knows exist. When 27-year-old Amrith Shenava realised that Tulu, his mother tongue, had almost no digital footprint, he decided to build one himself. His startup, TuluAI, now travels through rural Karnataka collecting stories, voice notes, gossip, and grandma wisdom to train an LLM that actually sounds like a Tulu speaker, jokes and all.
He is not alone. In Assam, Aakhor AI is doing the same for Bodo and Assamese, running “talk about your morning tea” voice-note drives. In Kashmir, KashmiriGPT is trying to keep an endangered language alive. All of them are fighting the same problem: big tech models simply do not get low-resource Indian languages, their accents, or their cultural nuance.
Building from scratch is slow, it is challenging, but it is also the only way to make AI that feels local, more relevant, more accessible.
➡️ I loved reading this article. So much of what we get from our neighbourhood AI chatbots is based on knowledge, language, and contexts from only a few cultureal contexts. Building models that learn from local cultures, regional dialects, and contextual knowledge can be a game changer in this AI-race but more importantly in using AI for good.
Thank you for reading this far!
With love on behalf of two women who cringe at the mention of chai tea latte,
Sudeshna
Co-Founder, DoorDesi 💃
Housekeeping
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