‘It’s today’. ‘My favourite day’

The world is sitting up to Indian food beyond curries and tandoori in choosing a city that offers an entirely new cuisine. My opinion piece in today’s @FinancialXpress why we need to revel in Bengaluru’s culinary moment as India’s only entry in top 20 food destinations

Who dies of a broken heart anymore? The mind instantly goes to Wislawa Szymborska’s True Love: “Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”

Wait a year or two. Area will change completely to have numerous ugly hotels and restaurants. Parking lots full. Idyllic will turn into ugly. Look at Kasauli in India. Look at Sikkim. #overtourism #savetheplanet

Male-dominated judiciary affects cases of rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, @IJaising tells me while talking about her book The Constitution is my Home in today’s @FinancialXpress @HarperCollinsIN

She can be whoever she chooses to be. And she has clearly chosen to be herself, despite options like ozempic. Everyone has their own health, mental, emotional issues. U have no right to be judgmental @MrinalPande1

‘Nobody has to stay. And yet some do.’

Welcome back and welcome home:)

RT @WokePandemic: A man in Odisha dug up his deceased sister’s grave and brought her skeleton to the bank Just to prove she had died. He h…

Look at this map. Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine. And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet. The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers. What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades. But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions. A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest. A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is. You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one. In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said. It chose the numbers. The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi. All forests, on paper. The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped.  The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion.  It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning. The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency.  I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to. This is not a technicality. This is the con. It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement. For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant. They did nothing. Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it. The BJP is different. When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it. The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real.  Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated.  The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally. CONT

My story today on the splendour that exists amid the semi-arid landscape of Chettinad & how it’s struggling to survive. The cultural cornucopia of Chettinad financialexpress.com/life/li… via @FinancialXpress

Poet-prof @Ashwanitiss eloquently captures the horrors of our current war-torn times through these poems, penned exclusively for @FinancialXpress

My story today on how a peek into his mom’s phone inspired Albinder Dhindsa to launch Blinkit, how he told his staff “we will die trying till we perfect 10-min delivery” financialexpress.com/busines… via @FinancialXpress @HarperCollinsIN @albinder

I write how the record Rs 167 cr for Raja Ravi Varma work will recalibrate Indian art values financialexpress.com/life/li… via @FinancialXpress

Does Dora The Explorer know our country is facing a fuel crisis?

It’s one thing for items to be delivered in 10 mins but for young women to be delivered within 10 mins to clean up your mess at 99/- per hour is cringe & exploitative. How do investors back these kind of business models? Poverty for profit.

Tehran is getting bombed by a superpower. Oil depots are being set on fire. But remarkably, it still has better air quality than Delhi. [Indians somehow have war-zone like quality of life -- without war.] Source: IQ Air

It’ll take Rana 1-2 wks to die after removal of support. Torturous death, not dignity! If allowing after due scrutiny, allow active euthanasia for swift painless death. SC hedged legal angles in 2018, but not patient well being. Many such ppl not even brain dead; feel, sense pain

No dignity even in death,

Trump: "When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen." He's right. Just look at America-the only country that's actually used them. On civilians. Twice.

Spain should henceforth be known as Spine