| | | Good morning! | | It’s human nature to panic about things we don’t really need to panic about — and remain completely oblivious about those that we do. This week saw two of those. The first is the rising chorus of reports on an increase in recorded cases of Covid-19. Three years ago, around the same time, I was writing a daily column (well, almost daily, and I kept it up for around 240 days in the first wave — and then wrote another 70 during the second) on Covid-19 worrying about just this statistic. But that was then — when we knew little about the disease, didn’t have a vaccine for it, nor knew how to treat it. Starting the third wave (early last year), the metric to look at has been neither recorded cases nor active cases (the total number of people currently infected with Covid), but number of hospitalisations and deaths. As I wrote in one of my last columns on Covid-19, the disease is now endemic, which means infections, even a surge of infections (like we see in the case of the flu) will happen. To make headlines out of an increase in number of cases is downright criminal. As is calculating percentage increases on a low base to arrive at staggering results — although the second does not surprise me given levels of numeracy in newsrooms, and not just in India. I would still recommend masking up in a closed, crowded environment — not just out of fear of infection from one of the Covid or flu variants going around, but because it is a good way to prevent the olfactory overload that characterises most closed rooms. At least a part of the increase in recorded cases of Covid-19 we are seeing is because of two variants of the flu virus doing the rounds, with some of the infected people worried about a lingering cough taking a Covid-19 test (with some of the tests showing a positive result). The rising number of flu cases, meanwhile, is all the more reason to take annual flu shots that have been available for many years now.  (Image source: TOLO News) The second bit of panic was about the earthquake in Afghanistan earlier this week that was strong enough and deep enough for significant tremors (with a capital T, the first of the movie franchise is a great B-movie) to be felt in India. That was enough for people to start discussing the coming “big one”. This, too, was irresponsible. As my colleagues Jayashree Nandi and Abhishek Jha pointed out, after speaking to a handful of seismologists, ongoing seismic activity is no predictor of future activity. Or to put it simply: We all know a big one is due in the Himalayan region, and has been for several decades; but there is no way of knowing whether any of the earthquakes the region has already seen are it, or whether the big one will come tomorrow — or 50 years hence. | | THINK But it isn’t just newsrooms that have a numeracy issue. The most interesting thing about the Delhi Budget, presented after some drama by the AAP government, was that it did not have a nominal growth number. Tamil Nadu, its finance minister said this week in the state’s Budget, will see a nominal growth of around 14%. Delhi? We do not know. If you are a resident of Delhi and would like to understand how the city state is doing on the tax front, whether the Union government has cut funding to Delhi (as claimed), or trends in capital-expenditure, you could do worse than spend a few minutes skimming through Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha’s very pointed analysis. | | | | THINK MORE Congress lawmaker from Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi, was disqualified yesterday, after a Surat court convicted and sentenced him in a criminal defamation case. This was always a given. That’s because the law is very clear on this. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling is explicit about the disqualification being immediate for lawmakers sentenced to at least two years in prison (Gandhi was handed the maximum punishment by the Surat court, two years). The ruling does not mention any respite if the sentence is suspended. A previous 2005 judgement of the Supreme Court is equally explicit that a stay of the sentence will not prevent disqualification — for that, the conviction itself will have to be stayed. To be sure, if a higher court stays the conviction, then, on appeal, upholds it, but reduces the sentence to below two years, Gandhi will dodge disqualification (as HT’s legal editor Utkarsh Anand pointed out in his explainer, Gandhi’s case comes under Section 8(3) of the Representation of People Act, 1951, which covers crimes where mere conviction will not entail disqualification, and that it requires the court “to hand down a sentence of at least two years for the disqualification to kick in”). In 2013, after the Supreme Court passed its order, the then United Progressive Alliance government sought to pass an ordinance giving lawmakers a three-month reprieve when convicted — ample time to appeal. This was opposed by Rahul Gandhi who, infamously, tore up a copy of the ordinance at a press conference, and termed the executive order “nonsense”. Gandhi’s conviction is likely to see a raft of similar suits, given the quality of political discourse, and the fact that there are at least five more state elections this year in the run-up to the national elections in 2024. HT’s editorial on Friday raised this likelihood — which is very high.  (Image source: PTI) It also hoped that Gandhi’s conviction would force a scrutiny of the provision of criminal defamation itself, one that politicians and companies use to good effect against the media, and one that many countries around the world (including some in sub-Saharan Africa) have scrapped, but the likelihood of this isn’t as high. | | KNOW For years now, Beijing has (unsuccessfully) sought to popularise the narrative that Covid-19 didn’t originate in Wuhan, and that it is a victim of defamation. Last fortnight, new evidence emerged that suggested that the virus may have been circulating in racoon dogs, one of the animals sold in the wet market at Wuhan. The evidence isn’t conclusive (that would have required actually taking a sample from a racoon dog at the market) but, in my opinion, strong enough to indicate a very high probability that this was the intermediate host of the virus, in its journey from horseshoe bats to humans. My colleague Kabir Firaque put out an excellent explainer on this. | | LEARN If mice could talk — and assuming they are our masters as Douglas Adams said — they’d definitely have a strong case of defamation against the Bihar police which claimed in 2017 that they’d drunk close to a million litres of liquor seized in the dry state. But seriously (and scientifically) speaking, drunk mice could actually be helping people get sober quicker, our science columnist Anirban Mahapatra wrote. | | READ MORE Pakistan’s perfect storm India and the global slowdown Issey Miyake’s #1 customer in India Stormy weather impacts India’s winter crop amidst shortages | | OUTSIDE Can you define woke? It’s a word that is possibly easy to use as a description of behaviour and attitudes — and many do, especially as a pejorative — but not that easy to define. Writing about the difficulties of defining the term, Thomas Chatterton Williams says in The Atlantic that it’s important to “acknowledge” that, “social-justice-movement insiders have different associations and uses for the word than do those outside these progressive circles” and that, “as with cancel culture, critical race theory, and even structural racism, the contested nature of the term imposes a preemptive barrier to productive disagreement.” | | WHAT I'M READING I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation earlier this week. The book is a collection of essays on writing — and covers a range of topics from ideation to style — but I thought it should have been titled Novelist as my Vocation. This is, at one level, an intensely personal book that tells us more about Murakami’s writing process (and evolution) than it is, even tangentially, a how-to for aspiring writers. Then, that is understandable — writing itself is an intensely personal process. | | WHAT I’M LISTENING TO Six years after it came out 50 years ago, a movie version of The Who’s Quadrophenia released, featuring 10 of the 17 tracks from the original album. Some consider it one of the finest British films made. Which is understandable. Because Quadrophenia, the second rock opera released by The Who, and written entirely by Pete Townshend, is among the best coming-of-age rock albums ever — and also perhaps among the last good music produced by the band. I suggest you start with the second track The Real Me, and then move on to the last, Love, Reign O’er Me to get a sense of just how good the album is. And then listen to it all — preferably loud and on loop. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? 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