| | | Good morning | | Years ago, at a Mint Luxury Summit in Mumbai, I met the head nose (or perfumer) of Guerlain. We got talking about (what else) perfumes, specifically the inputs that went into them (the perfume supply chain is complex). In the course of the conversation, I discovered that the best vetiver in the world comes from Reunion island, where it was taken in the mid-19th century by indentured workers from Tamil Nadu shipped there by the French, who’d struck a deal with the East India Company to do this. By the late 20th century, Reunion had become the world’s second largest exporter of vetiver oil — India was the largest — and the perfumer insisted that the island’s remoteness and unique weather conditions made its product far superior to India’s. By the time of our conversation, though, vetiver production on the island had fallen sharply, making it even more desirable. There is a little bit of India in the most unlikely places on Earth. India has always been a populous country (we are now a billion-and-a-half people). And given decades (up to a century-and-a-half) of assimilation in many countries they have migrated to (or been forced to migrate to; especially in the mid-nineteenth century), it isn’t surprising that towards the end of last millennium, people of Indian origin started becoming leaders of global corporations, even countries. At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit — it is in its 20th year, and this is my 17th summit — between November 8 and November 12 (a hybrid format this year like last; four evenings of online sessions followed by a physical conference), I will be in conversation with the CEO of a large global corporation who is the son of professionals from India who migrated to the US in the mid-twentieth century for better prospects. As I explained in a 2014 article in Mint, there is a simple numbers-based explanation for this. I wrote the article soon after Satya Nadella was named CEO of Microsoft, and in angry response to stories that suggested that there’s something unique about Indians that makes them suited to leadership roles in global corporations. Countries are a little different — some have rules that bar naturalised citizens from elected offices. But there’s no bar on natural-born citizens of any descent, in any country (which means people like the CEO I am speaking to at HTLS, are eligible to become the US president). According to a list of government leaders by Indiaspora, a nonprofit whose members are leaders of Indian origin or descent, there are six heads of government of Indian descent; three deputy heads of government; and at least 200 leaders (elected or nominated ones) across 15 countries, spanning almost every part of the world except Central and North Asia, China, Russia, and Japan. It’s difficult to put a number to people of Indian descent (it includes many who have not bothered to register themselves as Overseas Citizens of India or OCIs; there were 32 million NRIs and OCIs at last count). Could it be 100 million? 200 million? No one knows. What we do know is that there is an equally large population of people of Chinese descent, albeit, not as widely distributed as those of Indian descent. | | THINK That lengthy preamble was prompted by Rishi Sunak’s ascendancy to the premiership of the UK. Sunak’s paternal grandfather was from undivided India, and his parents got to the UK by way of Africa. He was born in the UK, but remains a practising Hindu. And his connection to India is especially strong in the minds of Indians because he is married to the daughter of a man who is arguably the country’s first middle-class hero, NR Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys. By now, you have probably read more than you want to about Sunak, so I will restrict myself to two aspects of his still-new prime ministership. One, he faces two significant challenges — reviving a moribund economy, and uniting a fragmented party that looks almost certain to lose the next general elections. Two, whichever way you look at it, his ascent is more about “hope” than “worry” as an op-ed in Hindustan Times pointed out. | | THINK MORE From hope to despair (who is one of the Endless; that one is purely for comics fans). The Paris climate agreement , adopted seven years ago, has two numerical temperature targets — to keep global warming (over pre-industrial levels) to below 2 degrees Celsius (°C) and to “pursue efforts to limit” it to 1.5°C. Ahead of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), which will be held at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt from November 6-18, a new UN report says that the latest submissions on Nationally Determined Contributions — essentially emission-reduction targets — of 193 countries, including several submitted after COP26, last year’s climate conference at Glasgow, will be insufficient to meet the 2 degrees target. While the trajectories of emissions across many countries have dipped according to the report, the latest NDCs still translate into global warming of 2.5°C by the end of the century. | | KNOW The layperson’s response to the climate crisis is to see it as a macro problem over which they have no control. But as the LiFE (lifestyle for environment) movement — first suggested by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at COP26, and recently launched by him and UN chief Antonio Guterres — argues, everyone can make a difference. HT columnist Arunabha Ghosh interviewed Guterres and said the UN chief stressed that “at an individual level, we must reduce our carbon footprint, be conscious of what we eat, how we move, and how we avoid waste”. Ghosh suggested a roadmap for the evolution of LiFE — nudging “individual behaviour towards sustainable consumption choices” in the first phase; enabling “markets to deliver more sustainable, accessible and affordable products and services” in the second phase; and redefining aspirations on “how policies and politics deliver collective societal goals”. | | LEARN From one impact of heat, to another (more desirable one). For almost a year now, HT Wknd columnist Swetha Sivakumar (who tweets as @Upgrade_My_Food ), a food researcher and industrial engineer, has been writing most engagingly about food (and foodstuffs), marrying the industrialisation of food production with nutrition science at one end and chemistry at another. This week, Sivakumar writes about the Maillard reaction, where heat causes reducing sugars to react with amino acids, browning food, and rendering it with a distinct flavour. | | READ MORE The cautionary tale of Ghaziabad’s gang rape that wasn’t Buzzing Goa gets a brand-new airport Why Rishi Sunak has an unenviable job The arc of peace in the north of South Asia | | OUTSIDE Britain, Derek Thompson writes in his latest newsletter, “is pretty poor for a rich place.” How did the country get here? It’s a problem that goes a long way back, to WWII; Britain’s recovery post-war was slower than that of many other countries. The country’s debt grew. Then, as Thompson writes, “in the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.” The financial crisis dealt a blow; so did Covid; but Britain’s economic problems are deeper. | | WHAT I'M READING It was the early 2000s when I read my first Reacher book. A bookseller at the Mumbai airport recommended it. This was the old Mumbai airport (it was a dump). And this was the smallest bookstore in the airport, tucked away in a corner. But its owner was a reader, and a smart curator. I was catching a late evening flight back to Delhi, and looking forward to a landing delay caused by congestion (this was the old Delhi airport). A few years later, one of the world’s top publishing executives told me he thought the Reacher books would be big the minute he read them (they’d still not become big). We’d met at a party and were the only two people there who’d read (and liked) The Dogs of Babel (and were lamenting how the masterpiece had gone unrecognised). Reacher did become big, bringing unexpected success to Lee Child (a pen name), the author — even prompting, in 2015, an article titled “The Lawless Pleasures of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Novels” in The New Yorker. The writer? Malcom Gladwell. By then, 20 Reacher novels were out. As Gladwell wrote: “Our contemporary fantasy is about lawlessness: about what would happen if the institutions of civility melted away and all we were left with was a hard-muscled, rangy guy who could do all the necessary calculations in his head to ensure that the bad guy got what he had coming.” Since 2020, though, the annual Jack Reacher novel has been written by Lee Child along with his brother Andrew Child. He announced that year that he planned to retire from the Reacher books but would write the next few with his brother, and then hand the franchise over entirely. The three books that have come out since have been disappointments — and that includes this year’s release, No Plan B. It’s probably the last Reacher book I will read. | | WHAT I’M LISTENING TO The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, where the blues musician born Chester Arthur Burnett, but known as Howlin’ Wolf, and his long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin (who created one of blues music’s biggest scandals by defecting to Muddy Waters’s group for six months in 1956 before returning to the fold), travelled to London in 1970 to play with Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voormann, and Ian Stewart. Steve Winwood’s keyboards were added in an overdubbing session later. The album is nowhere close to Wolf’s best — those would be Moanin’ in the Moonlight and Howlin’ Wolf — but it is good, honest blues, performed by a master along with a bunch of musicians he inspired. | 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 | | | | |
