| | | Good morning! | | Raining frogs I first encountered the story of the frog in boiling water — a frog placed in boiling water will jump and escape; one placed in warm or room-temperature water that is being heated will not notice the water becoming hotter till it is too late and die — in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline , a book about what he called “learning organizations”. That was in the early 1990s. Senge would visit India a few years later, in the late 1990s, to be part of the Call of the Time Dialogue organized by the Brahma Kumaris in Mount Abu. But this piece isn’t about Senge; it isn’t even about the frog — although some people believe our reaction to the climate crisis is much like the frog’s to being placed in room-temperature water that is being heated. That’s not true. Global warming, for instance, may be slow when seen in the context of our own timeframes and super-fast when seen in the context of deep time, but its manifestations are so strong that they cannot be ignored — especially if one joins the dots. Northern India was served a reminder of this on Wednesday, when a sharp, sudden dust storm/thunderstorm/hailstorm hit it. By the end of it, at least 59 people were dead, mostly in Uttar Pradesh. HT reported that “the system was the product of a complex atmospheric cocktail—multiple cyclonic circulations, abundant moisture from two seas on either side of the subcontinent, and extreme daytime heating—all supercharged by unusual persistence of the winter weather system known as Western Disturbances that should have retreated by now”. And why have they not retreated? The report had an answer for that too: “… record heat in the Arctic Circle that is displacing cold air southward, triggering unseasonable cold across locations such as the US Eastern Seaboard…” and which is also “pushing western disturbances into India”. There are no prizes for guessing what is causing the record temperatures in the Arctic – “Parts of Iceland logged near-record temperatures of 27°C in the Arctic Circle, while western Greenland hit 19.9°C, well above average for the time of year,” according to the report. | | After the storm Haryana mostly escaped the wrath of the storm – Delhi saw a few deaths – although the worthy who heads the state’s women’s commission did her bit to create enough of one in her own way. She complained about a Facebook post by Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, which, coupled with another complaint by a village leader was all that was required for the super-efficient Haryana Police to swing into action and arrest him. He is now out on bail, but on stringent conditions including what is effectively a judicial gag order, and will face a special investigation team that has been set up to interpret his post. The professor appears guilty of three things: being a Mahmudabad (his grandfather was one of the original funders of the Muslim League); his faith; and the language in which he chooses to write, English. People like him, and situations such as this one (a Facebook post following Operation Sindoor), become lightning rods for opportunists seeking to further their own careers – and that is exactly what appears to have happened in this case too. As HT pointed out in an editorial , “Time and again, the top court has rightly lamented how the lower judiciary and prosecutorial agencies need to be more circumspect in using their powers of arrest. But signals emanating from the top influence this behaviour. Freedom of expression might not be absolute in India, but it is still valuable, and worth protecting.” As our columnist Gautam Bhatia wrote in an Op-Ed , “it is important to point out that the judiciary does not have the power to gag or silence someone; it is only empowered to determine whether the government’s decision to do so is constitutional or unconstitutional. Here again, we see a judicially imposed gag order that is not backed up by legal reasoning. Instead of indicating what, in Mahmudabad’s post, potentially breached the law, the Court left this issue to be addressed subsequently by the SIT — but in the meantime, gagged Mahmudabad in any case.” The constitution of the SIT also poses a larger question, and Bhatia deals with that too: “This question is whether the Constitution requires us only to speak patriotically, and that therefore, can “unpatriotic” speech attract criminal legal consequences such as jail time. The Constitution does not, however, do any such thing. The grounds for restricting speech and expression are carefully set out under Article 19(2) of the Constitution, and none of them compel patriotism, or stipulate that only patriotic speech is worthy of being protected by the Constitution.” | | Stormy weather I have been managing a newsroom since I was 29, and I sometimes think I will be managing one when I am 95 – but I do have a retirement plan, one I speak and write about often. And that is to be to Gurugram, that complex bundle of patriarchy and corruption and commerce and suburbia, what Carl Hiaasen is to Florida. It is a sign of the times that more people now know about Hiaasen thanks to the Apple TV series, Bad Monkey (I would recommend it; and as I have mentioned here before, it has a fine collection of Tom Petty covers ), but that’s how it goes. Why Hiaasen? As Amy Weiss-Meyer writes in The Atlantic , “to say something is straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel is by now only a slightly less cliched way of saying that truth, especially in Florida, is stranger than fiction”. People in the National Capital Region know that applies to Gurugram as well (and perhaps too well). Hiaasen’s first solo novel, Tourist Season, was published in 1986, when he was 33. He is now 72, and his latest book Fever Beach has just been published. | | Quiet at 80 The United Nations is just around the same age as Who guitarist Pete Townshend , who turned 80 this week (and you can hear some of his best work on Quadrophenia ); it turns 80 in June. Bob Dylan turns 84 today (Saturday). That the UN has failed, repeatedly, is a fact – but it’s worth remembering that when it was formed, the world had just come off the biggest war it had ever seen, and enough leaders appeared keen to work towards the interest of all humanity, and not just their countries. As HT columnist Prashant Jha writes in Wknd (which comes out tomorrow), “It isn’t so much the UN that has failed, as the states that constitute it. That collective failure is embedded in the very nature of an international system based on sovereign statehood in principle, where major powers play a disproportionate role in practice. Eighty years ago, these two features of the system allowed for the formation of the United Nations, but also imposed limitations on it.” But that doesn’t mean we do not need the UN – we perhaps need a different version of it, with a structure that accurately reflects today’s geopolitics and today’s concerns. For there is still a lot to be done. “It remains an idea worth defending, amid intensifying wars and conflicts, and transnational challenges arising from the climate crisis, the pandemic, and technological disruption. The most powerful state in the international system may have launched a war against multilateralism, but the rest of the world, especially those on the margins, continue to need multilateral bodies and international mechanisms that allow them to express a voice and cast a vote,” concludes Jha. Essays of this kind are the reason Wknd is the best weekend supplement across newsrooms in India – starting with this cover story on the UN, the last four cover stories have been: trendspotting and fashion forecasting; heat; who’s rich (and who’s not); and Hitchcock at 100. That’s geopolitics, climate science, marketing and fashion, economics, and entertainment, a wide range. Which is why I was not surprised by the fact that we profiled, back in June 2023, Himanshu Saini, the chef at Tresind Studio , Dubai, who was in the news this week after his restaurant became the first Indian one to be awarded three stars by the Michelin guide. Both stories were written by Vir Sanghvi. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
