Unrest brewing over K Surendran's appointment as Kerala BJP president

The appointment of Sabarimala poster boy K Surendran as the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Kerala unit has brought out its differences with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). Surendran, one of the four general secretaries in the state, belongs to the faction led by Union minister V Muraleedharan, a known Modi-Amit Shah acolyte. The other faction, led by P K Krishna Das, a former state president, has the blessings of the RSS. Just a day after the announcement, general secretaries A N Radhakrishnan and M T Ra­mesh re­quested the central leadership to relieve them. 

Ravish Thantri Kumar, Kasaragod district president of the BJP, has threatened to quit politics after he was replaced by someone belonging to Muraleedharan faction. Claiming that it was impossible to work in the party if one does not belong to one or the other faction, Kumar has decided to dissociate from the party for the time being. In the last parliamentary elections, Kumar had come second in the Kasaragod constituency.

Tharoor’s wretched autocorrect 

At a recent public lecture, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor made the audience laugh  about his experiences with the autocorrect facility in his smartphone in the context of a discussion on artificial intelligence (AI). He referred to one of his tweets in which he had “carefully and accurately” typed the Hindi word ghoonghat (veil). The phone corrected it and launched it in cyberspace as “Go Hang Hat”, leaving Tharoor’s Twitter followers mystified. “On other occasions, I have driven readers to the dictionary, convinced that some auto-corrected typo of mine must be a word, since I had used it,” he said referring to his predilection for rarely-used words. “I’ve had to apologise so often to pe­ople that the AI in my smartphone has caught on, because every time I write the word ‘wretched’, the word projected on my iPhone is ‘autocorrect’…my ‘wretched autocorrect’ is something I constantly have to apologise for,” he said.