The Pāṇini Protocol: The Complete Saga from Challenge to Block

This is the full account of the Pāṇini Protocol: a scholarly encounter that began in good faith, passed the fire of public challenge, and ended in evasive silence. It is a case study in how a publicity-driven claim, never meant to withstand academic scrutiny, folds when it meets formal critique.

Mythic Battle between Ugra and YD


Prologue: “Perhaps This Is All A Misunderstanding”

December 2024 - February 2025

Early reactions to Yajnadevam’s claims were cautious, even generous. What he prsented as “Sanskrit” showed clear grammatical faults—but many assumed the information theoretic basis was sound.

We reached out in good faith:


Despite the long discussions in these threads [1], [2] (which were met with increasingly dismissive replies) we continued the conversation in private. There, we pointed out several key issues: the language lacked a consistent case system and verbal conjugation, phoneme frequencies resembled no form of Sanskrit (as later rigorously shown by @khoomeik), and the translations lacked grammar.

Upon reviewing his method, we found his “dictionary” turned out to be just a list of stems—not actual words. We urged him to try using a real one.

To summarize, our core claim was:

  1. Yajnadevam’s outputs aren’t Sanskrit—they violate basic grammar
  2. His method is so unconstrained that anything can be force-fitted as ungrammatical “Sanskrit”

To the first point, he replied “You don’t know what the Harappans wrote”. This dodges the issue. If the result is claimed to be Sanskrit, it must follow Sanskrit grammar—not hypothetical Harappan usage.

To the second, he replied with a dismissive challenge: “Decipher the US Constitution as Sanskrit”. This was likely meant to shut us up.

Instead, we took it seriously.

The Seeds of the Pāṇini Protocol

07 July 2025

We applied his method (including his own phoneme classing, ungrammatical constructs, and reliance on unicity distance) to the U.S. Constitution. We used the key revealed to us by Thomas Jefferson in a dream to decode and translate the United States Constitution well past the unicity dsitance he set at the time:


The results looked exactly like his: ungrammatical Sanskrit, vague stems, and a total absence of structure. In other words, it worked.

Thus began the Pāṇini Protocol: which would soon become a full-scale demonstration that any text, when tortured through his method, can yield “Sanskrit” that’s just as ungrammatical as his original. What follows is a surprisingly textbook progression through all five stages of grief, triggered by Jefferson’s Key working too well.

Kuebler Ross Model: 5 Stages of Grief


Chapter 1: Denial

08-14 July 2025

1.1 Initial Skepticism and Bewilderment

08 July 2025

The initial reaction from Yajnadevam and his supporters was one of confusion and disbelief, a kind of collective bewilderment. For reasons still unclear, they were unable to process the fact that a dhoti-clad Pikachu had received a magic phoneme key from Thomas Jefferson in a dream and then used it to decipher the U.S. Constitution.

This produced some charming moments where a few in the audience simply forgot to scroll:


While others remained in incredulity, firmly believing that the key’s success was a fluke:


To quell such doubts about the efficiacy of Jefferson’s Key, we used it to produce translations not only of the critic’s own tweet, but also of Twitter brainrot:


1.2 Early Foreshadowing

08 July 2025

Yajnadevam himself, was apparently on vacation and had not read my decipherment yet. Nevertheless, he quickly surfaced to confidently announce that my unicity distance was wrong:


The lowercase complaint was a complete red herring. The ciphertext under consideration was entirely uppercase to begin with (in scriptio continua too, like the Indus seals), making the objection moot. The “LL to A” point was (apart from being flatly false) equally hollow, given his own decipherment tolerates far sloppier symbol clustering. In hindsight, this irrelevant objection, and a misrepresentation of my position as “a challenge to information theory” foreshadowed the wave of goalpost-shifting that would soon follow.

1.3 Still Unconvinced?! Sigh…

10 July 2025

While Yajnadevam was still on vacation and hadn’t yet read the decipherment, his followers remained unconvinced. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe that my key was actually revealed in a dream and hence magical—perhaps imagining that I had brute-forced some “algorithm” on a “dataset” or whatever else made it easier to sleep at night. At first, we were responding to these doubts individually:


But soon, this became tedious and frankly, beneath us. So we went straight for the final nail in the coffin, and translated Nietzsche’s German:


1.4 Initial “Rebuttals” That Exposed the Blueprint

10 July 2025

Two days after the decipherment, the responses began to shift from knee-jerk dismissal to actual engagement. But most critiques ended up questioning assumptions that were straight out of Yajnadevam’s own method—effectively dismantling the very thesis they were trying to defend.

For example, Yajnadevam claimed that my unicity distance was “much larger than the constitution, perhaps much much larger”, without providing a number or even a formula. Ironically, I had computed the unicity distance using the same method in his draft, making the objection an inadvertent admission that his formula was flawed. He would later concede this in opaque terms:


Still unwilling to accept that Jefferson’s Key had actually worked, Yajnadevam tried to move the goalpost by demanding that my method work for any Latin alphabet text. Meanwhile, some of his followers began innovating novel approaches to deflect from the results, like questioning the entropy of the translations and demanding Sanskrit be reverse-translated with my key, while others admitted to lacking technical competence in arithmetic:

division error tweet


In parallel, some began pointing out what they saw as glaring flaws: the key had ambiguous phoneme classes, many-to-many mappings ([1],[2],[3]), and other such horrors. Unfortunately for them, these were faithful imitations of Yajnadevam’s method. In trying to critique our work, they accidentally spotlighted the nonsensical mechanics of his entire system:


1.5 The Challenge Ascends to Mythical Status

10 July 2025

At this point, rather than admit the demonstration succeeded, Yajnadevam launched into monologue:


Apparently, I had become the final boss who had challenged information theory itself. In truth, all I did was point out what any honest student of Sanskrit and mathematics could have. This refutation was the casual work of a bored student over a weekend, not some grand academic takedown.

Yet, our method turned out to be effective enough to trigger a meltdown. And who doesn’t enjoy a bit of drama? Naturally, we grabbed the opportunity, and that’s how the Pāṇini Protocol was born:


1.6 Final Stages of Confusion

13-14 July 2025

By now, Yajnadevam’s followers had already scored multiple self-goals. It was only fitting that YD would follow suit.

He began by complaining about the phoneme groupings in our key—only for us to show they were lifted directly from his own phoneme classes.

He next criticized the grammar of our translations, labeling correct usages as errors simply because he didn’t recognize them. We highlighted his lack of familiarity with Sanskrit and pointed out that several of his nitpicks on orthography were mirrored in his own scheme. For good measure, we also highlighted fresh grammatical issues in his own decipherments.

He then made a series of claims about orthography that were, to put it kindly, confused:

He also claimed our key had a “recursive sandhi” issue. But this was because he hadn’t read the decipherment properly.

And when all of this was pointed out, he tried to fall back on “cultural references” in his own translations. Naturally, we too cherry-picked cultural references in ours, exploiting the vastness of the Hindu corpus

Finally, he engaged in some distilled wordcelling about unicity distance, throwing around large numbers without clarifying anything of substance. We responded by throwing around even larger numbers:


Denial Wears Thin

But something was changing. The resistance began to crack. Yajnadevam was starting to realize the key really worked.

Yet a small residue of disbelief remained. Reaching for the last straw, he challenged us to decipher random, isolated English words, without regard to whether they actually occur in the Constitution:


Of course, we would soon show that all these words can be deciphered using Jefferson’s Key:


And with this, all doubts regarding the efficacy of Jefferson’s key were cleared. Its omnipotence was now too obvious to ignore. Resistance was futile. Our Unicity Distance was correct*, our grammar flawless*, translations meaningful*, and there did not remain a single word that was not readable*—even outside the Constitution! At this point, he already seemed to have given up on hard calculations of unicity distance and shifted to throwing around jargon. Naturally, this led the emotional arc to stage two.

*As “correct”, “flawless”, “meaningful”, and “readable” as his own, of course

Chapter 2: Anger

15-16 July 2025

Once the reality of the dream-revealed key had sunk in, the discourse turned… colorful.

Yajnadevam, now firmly in the anger stage, responded by channeling ancient curses in UTF-8: unleashing the string “ञकथय्तफभैीय्ूथाख्वोस्ंॢपर्चटीपेिठचछलद्टग्ज्ड्खठृंफ्ह्ौकब्हतछढध्दधःभलस्लश्य्चढैीॢैथगज्श्ॢद्घििॄमुजल्ोीघ्ंीॄछङ्द्ःक्िॄशब्प्ल्घणष” (sic), perhaps hoping sheer “entropy” would destroy the key. Of course, this was a strawman.

Then came this gem:


(We had intentionally chosen this derivation to parody the kind of interpretive acrobatics Yajnadevam regularly performs. Naturally, we later demonstrated correctness usign his own playbook to avoid nitpicks)

And then, this AI-generated masterpiece (still not sure why Jefferson is the janitor—audience suggestions welcome):


Indeed, the hypothetical theories formulated here were rendered irrelevant once we published concrete counter evidence.

Chapter 3: Bargaining

16-19 July 2025

3.1 Sorry, I Don’t Speak Sanskrit

16 July 2025

On the same day, we witnessed a fascinating transition state: the tail-end of anger bleeding into the soft beginnings of bargaining. Yajnadevam floated a curious plea: he couldn’t have twisted Pāṇini’s rules… because he doesn’t know Pāṇini. That level of grammatical acrobatics, he insisted, was only possible by a professional Pāṇini assassin type dude (sic) such as Eeshan (sic):


Despite his flattering words, we’re nowhere close to an expert on Pāṇini ourselves. But we’re also not the one claiming to have deciphered the Harappan script as Pāṇinian Sanskrit. That burden of grammatical soundness falls squarely on the one making the claim, and it precedes any mathematical jugglery layered on top. If the base grammar is wrong, the uniqueness of the cipher is irrelevant. This claim is further problematic for two reasons:

  1. If you’re presenting something that depends entirely on linguistic validity as a correct decipherment in Sanskrit, then knowing Sanskrit—or at least consulting those who do—is the bare minimum. Instead, Yajnadevam has routinely been dismissive to genuine feedback from Sanskrit scholars

  2. Yajnadevam claims his decipherment is “correct Sanskrit” and backs it with references to Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. You can’t invoke Pāṇini’s rules to legitimize your work and then say you aren’t qualified when someone points out you’re misusing them.

If anything, this admission only underscores the problem: someone with no training in the grammar is now making sweeping claims about having deciphered a script, especially when the claim rests completely on grammatical correctness:


3.2 Your Key is Too Effective!

16 July 2025

When The Concept Of “Glides” Glides Over Your Head

With denial exhausted and anger spent, Yajnadevam began negotiating with minor differences in my key compared to his:


To be fair, our key is slightly different—it’s more internally consistent. Our rules for choosing among multiple phonemes represented by a single grapheme are more consistent, and even have parallels in Latin and Avestan orthography. This is in contrast to his own system where, by his own admission, there are no rules; just vibes:


Can Yajnadevam’s Script Even Write Sanskrit?

Another of Yajnadevam’s argument on the same theme was that our key offered too much leeway by not enforcing compulsory vowel overrides. But as we pointed out, his own key either (1) behaves similarly or else (2) it becomes incapable of writing Sanskrit at all:


Instead of addressing this, he strawmanned our point, claiming we expected his key to replicate Devanagari-level fidelity.

At this point, Yajnadevam was pivoting in every direction from phoneme clusters to orthographic fidelity to grammar nitpicks to information theory jargon to challenges to decipher nonsense strings. So we posed a straightforward question: What kind of demonstration would actually count as conclusive?

Instead of answering, he deflected with yet another strawman, claiming we were out to falsify Shannon’s Information Theory itself.

3.3 Slowly Coming To Terms?

17 July 2025

By now, the outbursts had subsided, and bargaining took a more refined shape:

But this framing is not just reductive, it’s misleading.

First, our demonstration doesn’t merely cast doubt on uniqueness—it directly disproves his claim to correctness. If any text can be “decoded” into ungrammatical Sanskrit using the same method, the entire foundation of his thesis crumbles. Reducing this to a technical disagreement over redundancy values is a deflection.

Second, having outlined these three points himself, he then promptly declared all of them to be false without offering a shred of proof. No counter-calculations, no arguments, no evidence—just pure vibes.

He promised to “precisely compute” the unicity distances in the future. As of now, we’re still waiting.

Whether he realized it or not, this was textbook bargaining: a careful repackaging of the debate to control the fallout, while trying to delay or defer the consequences.

3.4 A Small But Important Concession

19 July 2025

While still trying to deflect from our broader challenge, Yajnadevam began digging into specific words from our decipherment—hoping, perhaps, to catch a mistranslation that would undermine the whole.

One such example was शतग. He pointed out that this word only appears in Varāhamihira’s Yogayātra 4.37, and claimed it didn’t make sense in the instrumental case, and certainly not as “chariot,” which is how we had translated it.

Now, we won’t quibble over Varāhamihira (of course, our derivation is straightforward as a मध्यमलोप of “शतयोजनग”), but this is a revealing moment.
By insisting that शतग is invalid due to lack of proper attestation, Yajnadevam has inadvertently conceded that Sanskrit decipherments must follow standard usage. Which means: you can’t just make up meanings:


To be continued…