Aayush
Anand

Who we is

It is me. Everything on this site — the reporting, the scripts, the voice on the films, the code that draws the charts, the tools — is made by one person in Goa, India.

The site says "we" in places because the work has a standard it answers to and that standard is bigger than a mood on a given day. But there is no newsroom behind the word, and you should know that before you decide how much weight to give anything here. One person reading at the volume of a newsroom is still one person. It is the reason the verification gaps are printed on the films instead of quietly left out.

Who pays

I do. Domain, server, rendering, the speech model that reads the narration in my own cloned voice — all of it out of my own pocket, from money earned doing something else entirely. That is the whole funding statement; there is nothing under it.

What that buys: nobody can be rung up about a story. There is no advertiser to lose, no grant cycle to survive, no proprietor with a view, and no commercial relationship with anyone this site reports on. If a film is wrong, it is wrong because I got it wrong, which is a cleaner kind of failure than the alternative.

What it costs, said plainly: no editor over my shoulder, no fact-checking desk, no lawyer on retainer, and no second pair of eyes before publication. Those are real protections and I do not have them. The compensation is procedural — every claim carries an id, every document is linked, every open verification is printed on the film itself, and the right of reply goes out in writing before publication, answered or not.

If this ever stops being true — if money arrives from anywhere, in any form, including a grant — it gets written on this page before the next film goes out, not after.

Why journalism

Because it is the thing I kept coming back to. Long before any of this, I was writing about Indian public life for whoever would publish it — the surveillance state, the whistleblower with no protection, the corruption movement that ate itself, the settlers nobody counted.

Those pieces are eleven years old. Some of them I would now argue with. They are listed because a masthead that asks you to trust its reporting should show you what its reporting looked like before anybody was watching, including the parts that have aged badly.

Countercurrents · 2015–2016

1. Why Are Smart Cities Being Shoved In The Public's Throat?2 Feb 2016
2. Life And Death Of The Anti-Corruption Movement28 Dec 2015
3. GMO: A Detour From Naturale24 Nov 2015
4. The Growing Fangs of RSS22 Oct 2015
5. The Persistent Plight of Settlers in Assam22 Sep 2015
6. The Predicament That Is Whistleblowing In India9 Sep 2015
7. The Dark Side Of Aadhaar Card3 Sep 2015

The full archive: countercurrents.org/author/aayush-anand

IndiaResists · 2015–2016

I also wrote for IndiaResists. The site is gone — indiaresists.com now redirects to a Facebook page, and the articles exist only in the Internet Archive. Rather than print links that resolve to nothing, here is the archive itself: the site as it stood in 2016. If you have a direct link to something of mine there, send it to open@sealedsecrets.org and it goes on this page.

An outlet that disappears and takes its archive with it is, incidentally, a decent argument for why this one keeps its documents at permanent addresses.

What I will not do

No payment for a story, in either direction. No copy shown to a subject before publication beyond the findings in a right-of-reply letter. No story killed because somebody asked. No embargo traded for access. No anonymous quote where a document would do. No story about anyone I have a commercial relationship with — and if that ever becomes unavoidable, the relationship gets disclosed on the film.

And the one specific to how this is made: the narration is my own voice, cloned from my own recordings, and it is never used to speak as anybody else. No platform requires that disclosure. It is on every film anyway.

Reaching me

open@sealedsecrets.org — corrections, right of reply, press, legal. It is an ordinary mailbox at an ordinary provider, which means it can be compelled. It is not a drop box and this site will never call it one. If you have a document, read how to send it first.

Corrections are published, not quietly patched: the claim file changes, the film re-renders at the same address, and a card appears on screen at the moment the correction applies.