| | | Good morning! | | Many years ago, at the end of a meeting where I'd aired an idea about a new product, one my colleagues said I was the "best first draft person" she'd met. It wasn't meant as a compliment (and I did not take it as one). As important as first drafts are — not everyone can come up with bright ideas (Ahem!) — it takes a lot to convert them into products, business models, and policies. Indeed, impulsive policy making based on the promise of miraculous results or the expectation of public acclaim often fails in terms of outcomes. The question then is, has enough thought gone into Agnipath, the four-year tour-of-duty scheme announced by the government to serve as the only avenue for entry-level recruitment in the non-officer cadre in the armed forces? To be sure, the scheme was announced with a fair amount of detailing, and the government said in a clarification in response to criticism that the plan has been in the works for two years. Still, despite all the planning, the government had to scramble post-facto to announce priority recruitment (not guaranteed, though) in the central police forces of 75% of the Agniveers (as they are called) who will not be retained after four years; the facilitation of Class XII and graduate certification; and also discuss options for their employment in state-owned banks. Late on Thursday, the government also announced a two-year age relaxation (as a one-time exception) even as young people in many parts of the country took to the streets to protest the new scheme. Does the scheme mark the gig-ification of the armed forces, as some claim? Will it result in a militarisation of Indian society in the medium-term? Or is it an efficient and economical way to create a tech-savvy and future-proof army? Many veterans have simply called for flexibility based on the outcomes. | | THINK The Congress party, too, took to the streets — but not to protest the new army recruitment scheme or inflation (wholesale inflation rose to 15.9% in May, the 14th straight month it has stayed in double digits), but the interrogation of Rahul Gandhi by the Enforcement Directorate. Despite concerns over India's investigative agencies doing the Union government's bidding — they usually have — there is adequate legal recourse available to those who believe they are being unfairly targeted, and a mass protest over an interrogation (fine, a series of interrogations) does seem out of place, especially at a time when there are other serious issues before the country that opposition parties should be raising. Inflation is one such. While India's inflation problem is actually better than what some developed countries face, it is likely that it could be on account of weak demand (unlike those countries). That could be problematic. Unemployment is another, with the (dated, but relevant) PLFS for 2020-21 released earlier this week highlighting a qualitative decline in jobs in the immediate wake of the pandemic-induced federal lockdown in 2020. But clearly, the party is another universe. | | | | THINK MORE As is the India where children keep falling into borewells. Such accidents may have always happened, but it was only after 2006, when a boy named Prince fell into a borewell in a village in Haryana's Kurukshetra district, and his ordeal and rescue were captured on live TV, that they entered mainstream consciousness. It's easy to understand why such accidents happen — like with Delhi's supply problem, declining groundwater level is the ultimate reason. The result is dry bores, sometimes 50-100 metres deep, and not always covered. Not all such accidents have happy endings, but this one, concerning young Rahul Sahu, a deaf and speech-impaired boy in a Chhattisgarh village thankfully did, but after almost four days (and a bit). | | KNOW No one really expected the 12th ministerial conference of WTO to end with a deal, but early on Friday, deep into overtime, the body's 164 members arrived at one, after five days of negotiations and hard bargaining. India has reason to be happy with the outcome. It managed to retain subsidies for its fisherfolk (many of whom practice subsistence fishing) even as countries signed off on ending many other fishing subsidies, a move that should hopefully control overfishing. Its push for a permanent solution to the contentious issue of public stockholding of food was kicked down the road to the next ministerial. It will not be unhappy with the partial waiver of IP on Covid-19 vaccines that allows developing countries produce and export them (although health activists say this is still not enough). And it agreed to continue a moratorium on e-commerce tariffs (it has been clear for some time that this was always a bargaining chip for the country). | | LEARN I first read about the miracle cancer drug trial in New York Times (which may well have been the first to report it) Like with any other trial that turns up miraculous results, there are caveats, but as our science columnist Anirban Mahapatra wrote earlier this week, the results of this one show that our approach to treating cancers is working . And what approach is that? As Mahapatra writes: "We are getting better at treating cancers more effectively and with fewer adverse effects, based on their precise hallmarks. This is a shot in the arm for precision medicine." | | READ MORE A lost year for the Sensex Report links Pune policeman to hacking bid on Bhima Koregaon accused. What ails Indian news TV? The important symbolism of the presidential polls. | | OUTSIDE Nothing is quite as fascinating as the real science underlying popular culture constructs such as movies. For instance, with a hat-tip to MCU, is the multiverse real? The explanation, as is to be expected, lies in physics — which is the science one should study in quest of the answer to the ultimate question (and, quite honestly, 42 has now become a cliche). As a recent article in Nautilus puts it the concept of the "many branching universe" lies in what is called "inflation theory", first suggested by physicist Alan Guth in 1981. As Guth explained in a 2014 interview to Scientific American: "The theory of eternal inflation says that once inflation starts, it never completely stops. Rather, it ends in places, and universes form there. We call them pocket universes because they're not everything that exists. We are living in one of these pocket universes. And even though the pocket universes keep forming, there's always a volume of exotic repulsive gravity material that can inflate forever, producing an infinite number of these pocket universes in a never-ending procession. Each individual pocket universe will presumably ultimately die, in the sense that it will run out of energy and cool down. But in the big picture of all the pocket universes, life would not only go on eternally, but there'd be more and more of it every instant." But the Nautilus article goes further — it explains what happens when one overlays string theory on top of the concept of eternal inflation: "String theory proposes that our cosmos contains additional dimensions, all curled up on themselves at some tiny scale, so we don't normally see them. The exact way those dimensions curl up determines the physics that we observe, but there are somewhere around 10500 different ways to make the curling happen, and string theory can't say which one should correspond to our particular universe. When you combine this string theory 'landscape' with eternal inflation, you get a chance to realize all possible configurations of the curled-up dimensions…" So, yes, the good folks at MCU have it right . There is a multiverse, and it is real. | | WHAT I'M READING  (Click to expand) In some ways, a book about another multiverse. James Bridle's Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence (also published as Ways of Being: Animals, Plants and Machines — The Search for a Planetary Intelligence). As we understand more about intelligence thanks to our current obsession with AI, and with advanced scientific techniques now allowing us to capture processes and collate data once hidden from us, it is becoming clear that there is intelligence all around us in the natural world. At its core, Ways of Being is a deeply philosophical exploration of whether our discovery and realisation of these other intelligences warrants a revision of a humans-are-the-smartest-and-the-centre-of-everything approach that characterises the modern world as we know it. But let me not put you off with all that talk of philosophy — there is also a lot of science in Ways of Being, especially when Bridle is writing about intelligence in the natural world. | | WHAT I'M LISTENING TO Garcia Live Vol 18, released earlier this month but from a 1974 performance at Keystone Berkeley, featuring Jerry Garcia with long-time collaborator Merl Saunders jamming away on some classic reggae, rock, blues, and jazz standards (including my favourite on this album, Freedom Jazz Dance, a Eddie Harris classic that became a standard after Miles Davis performed it), and recorded by the legendary Betty Cantor-Jackson (the Deadheads reading this will understand the significance). This recording is from a time when Garcia was at the peak of his abilities, well before his lifestyle took a toll on his playing, and this album shows why many consider him among the greatest guitar players ever. And to close the loop — the Dead were a multiverse in themselves. | Please share your feedback with us What do you think about this newsletter? | | 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 | | | | |
