Broken Undda

Why only India?

Muslims in India are being told public roads aren't for prayer, while Indian wedding processions are taking over the streets of Midtown Manhattan. If Manhatta the busiest place on earth can accommodate a wedding procession, why is a short Eid prayer in India treated like a national crisis? It’s not about the traffic; it’s about the respect. Hypocrite India 👎🏾

If you ever feel you are dumb, just remember that there are people who blame BJP and Modi ji for the heat. 🤡

Open letter to Indians in America. -- Dear brothers and sisters from Bharat: Like I did 37 years ago, you arrived in America with no money but with a good education and cultural heritage from Bharat. You achieved outstanding success. America was good to us. For that we must remain grateful - gratitude is our Bharatiya way. Yet today, a significant number of Americans, may be not the majority but not too far from it either, believe that Indians "take away" American jobs and our success in America was unfairly earned. You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself. That is the "hard right" vs "woke left" battle. You are mere bystanders to that conflict. Meanwhile there is one thing that is true now and will be true in the future: the respect Indians command world-wide will substantially depend on the fortunes of India herself. If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn ("hellhole") and we must not confuse either with respect. Respect in today's world, along with prosperity and security, comes from one source: a nation's technological prowess. India produces sufficient brain power to achieve that prowess but alas we exported so much of that talent, particularly to America. As we develop that prowess in India, our civilisational strength will assert itself. As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent. Our vast youthful population needs the technology leadership you gained over the years to guide them towards prosperity. Let's do it with a missionary zeal. Respectfully Sridhar Vembu

Why only India?

summers aren't new... high temperatures exceeding 40 celsius every other day isn't new either. what is new in urban/ semi urban Inya is endless construction, and destruction of all green/ semi green patches, and water bodies

My Dear Pakistanis, what do you think about Pakistani Hindus? Write your comments as Indians can feel.

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++