Are we devouring the planet?

Even if the world weans itself from fossil fuels, the climate story will continue to overheat our atmosphere. Transition towards quitting fossil fuels may have begun, with nations and corporations with their net-zero commitments, but emissions of greenhouse gases are unlikely to be curtailed anytime soon. But the climate story will continue unabated. With overall food system generating about one-third of global emissions, it is FOOD that is as big a climate challenge as OIL. Even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, food production alone would account for emissions to increase global temperature by 2°C before 2100. 

Climate change impacts are already making the problem hard to fix. The earth’s twin abilities to produce food and to store carbon are at a cross purpose. Producing more food means more land to be cleared for cultivation at the cost of losing natural carbon storehouses. This means the carbon dioxide the land could absorb if it weren’t used for crop production. Studies project that total demand for more farmlands could amount to 10 million square kilometers by 2050, equivalent to the size of Canada. In climate context, this will amount to colossal waste, as land is the vast reservoir of carbon - holding three times as the atmosphere and four times as much as above-ground vegetation. If the Paris climate summit target has to be met, the world will need to eliminate three-fourths of food-related emissions by 2050. But instead of preserving land to sequester emissions, it is about what is called ‘eating-the-earth’ problem. 

It is now clear that the world has to get more out of the earth without using more of the earth. Mark Twain had rightly remarked, they are not making more of it. The land problem is mostly an agriculture problem (We Are Eating the Earth by Michael Grunwald). The land used to live, learn, work, and play is just a fraction of the land that is used to cultivate food. The farming sprawl is thirty times that of the urban sprawl, the size of Asia plus Europe have already been converted into farmland. The issue at the core is the expanding agricultural footprints which is at enormous cost to our best defenses against climate change. That would account for more forests and other natural carbon storehouses. 

The food system itself is not climate friendly, and probably the most destructive. Every piece of land needs to be valued either as a potential food source or a potential carbon sink. Either way it is ‘carbon’ that is at the center. To return atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels of 1750, soils would need to absorb 680 billion tons (Regenesis by George Monbiot). However, sucking up of carbon isn’t a linear phenomenon and much still remains to be known. What could be done in theory is not the same as what can be done in practice. To address the uncertainty, ‘Four Per Thousand’ global campaign has been launched to increase the carbon content uniformly in farm soils by 0.4 percent. While tropical and temperate soils significantly vary in their carbon sucking capacity, in theory it can help trap 89 percent of agricultural emissions. 

Fossil fuels have been conceived as the biggest problem while the eating-the-earth remains under-publicized and under-understood. The fossil fuel problem is getting better understood but not others. Critical is to learn what went wrong when and how, before solutions could be prescribed. The human destruction of nature began a long time before the industrial revolution (The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith). Way back in the year 1208, the Charter of Forests (issued by England’s King Henry III) became the written law that acknowledged human freedom to exploit natural resources. Till the advent of industrial revolution, the benign climate and rainfall allowed both imperial and colonial forces to clear land, expand cultivation, and build cities. Not much seems to change since then.

While quitting fossil fuel could only be part of the solution, the challenging task is the need to preserve ecosystems that sequester carbon. It is in this regard that beef could be avoided as it uses more land for producing less. One cow meat is as much as 100 chickens, emitting 50 times more greenhouse gases than coal. Given that there are multiple reasons contributing to climate change, there cannot be one solution to fix the problem. It has thus been realized that changing the consumption pattern of 8 billion people and the production pattern of 600 million will be extremely complex. Only systemic changes can stop frying the planet, guilt-trapping people into individual actions may have modest impacts. Undoubtably, food is now as big a climate challenge as oil and coal. While the farms that feed the world might not consume the entire earth, it makes two-fifths of our planet’s land vulnerable. The challenging task ahead is to produce more food per acre alongside restoring unproductive lands to nature. Each of us is eating the earth but how we eat matters. 

First published in Hindustan Times on Aug 26, 2026

Legacy of the rebel begam

During the centenary year of the Uprising, the first war of India’s independence, Jawahar Lal Nehru had requested the Indian embassy in Kathmandu in 1957 to search for Begum Hazrat Mahal’s grave. Why the woman who seemed to have come from nowhere and vanish into nothingness gained so much interest? She remains an elusive figure in Indian history - little being clear about her early life, date and place of birth. But she was known to be the daughter of a slave – of African ancestry – and a domestic servant.

Considered by many that she was an unscrupulous woman who led a failed revolt before vanishing completely, upon her death a government official had curiously wondered ‘who she was’? Archivist and a historian specializing in colonial history, Rosie Llewellyn Jones from the University of London brings to life the begum’s story, the relationship she had with her ex-husband King Wajid Ali Shah and the part she played during the Uprising in 1857. Having had constructed the imagery of the king in The Last King of India in 2014, the acclaimed historian rescues the unlike ruler from obscurity, Hazrat Mahal.

She had neither royal blood nor family connections with nobility but became an accidental heroine by getting married to the king. However, the marriage didn’t last long. Towards the end of the 1840s the king divorced Hazart Mahal and seven other mut’ah wives. The king undertook around 375 wives in two kinds of union, the nikah or permanent marriage and mut’ah or temporary marriage. Noticeable is the fact that the king didn’t associate with any woman without getting into some kind of marriage. What is known is that she entered the life of the king as a courtesan and was named Hazrat Mahal. She gave birth to their son Birjis Qadr in 1844 and, after Wajid Ali inherited the throne, briefly enjoyed the position of a favorite before getting divorced.

In 1856, the East India Company annexed Awadh and deposed Wajid Ali Shah. The takeover was sudden and brutal, with the deposed king exiled and eventually imprisoned in Calcutta. Under the new situation, thirteen-year-old Birjis Qadr became the royal figurehead of Awadh’s rebel opposition and his mother, the begam, its de facto leader. Hazrat Mahal was forced to unite the fragmented rebels: erstwhile nawabs, powerful landowners, enraged soldiers and citizenry. Lack of education and experience notwithstanding, she negotiated with an unimaginably powerful enemy by keeping the rebels united. And at the center of her brief rule was one of the most dramatic episodes in the colonial history: the siege of the Lucknow Residency. It was not a single structure, but the generic name for a 33-acre complex on a hill overlooking the Gomti.

What makes her story unique is how she seized the opportunity and exploited it to keep the all-powerful East India Company at bay for nearly a year. That in itself deserves recognition. and equally remarkable is how she was able to influence trusted officers much senior her age. An erstwhile province of the Mughal empire, Awadha gained virtual independence at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It didn’t last long. Towards the middle of the century, the East India Company had overwhelming presence all across. 

Rosie observes that writing the first full-length biography of the begum was not without negotiating several opposing points of view, to present an honest picture of the extraordinary woman. Without doubt, Hazrat Mahal was so closely associated with the Uprising that it was often difficult to separate her own history from the events that took place during that period. It was not lack of courage on her part that led to the defeat but lack of resources. It is clear that Hazrat Mahal chose exile in Nepal in 1860, never to live under the colonial rule. 

Spread across nine chapters, Hazrat Mahal provides details of the begum’s remarkable transition from poverty and obscurity to becoming a wealthy, confident woman in a royal household. The king could not have related in any way to Hazrat Mahal’s background. A lower-class woman from a servile background had found no reason to emulate the niceties of the royal language. She was focused on what was important: trying to wrest Awadh from the British enemy. Interestingly, the begum was rarely seen on the battlefield not as a participant but an observer, concealed in a curtained howdah on the back of an elephant. 

The fifteen months between the departure of the king and the start of the Uprising saw the emergence of a rebel begam named Hazrat Mahal.

Hazrat Mahal
by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones      
PanMacmillan, New Delhi
Extent: 273, Price: Rs. 560.

First published in www.raagdelhi.com (Hazrat Mahal: Legacy of a rebel begum)

Will history repeat itself?

The world hasn’t yet fully come to terms with the idea that, within the next decade, an impoverished former colony could become the third-largest economy in the world. It is further projected that, for the first time in 300 years, no European country will be among the three largest economies. Will an impoverished country that, in the middle of the 20th century, accounted for three percent of global gross domestic product, now be among the top three global economies?

In his insightful examination of the shifting global order, Minhaz Merchant concludes that by 2030, India will reshape the world order. This would be a remarkable achievement for a country that hasn’t been viewed as an economic power since the rise of colonialism about three centuries ago.

Before the emergence of the West, India was referred to as ‘sone ki chidiya’, a metaphor to reflect its immense wealth, culture, and influence. The idea of the ‘golden bird’ lives on as a reminder of the region’s rich past -- and perhaps also as a vision for its future. The metaphor was ‘real’ not too long ago. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, in 1750, India accounted for 24 percent of global wealth. However, British rule – they were definitely here for profit with some proselytization thrown in on the side -- ensured that the country was stripped of its natural resources and subjected to rapacious economic practices.

Era of India opens a window to this political and economic history that influenced and shaped the modern nation. In three distinct and immensely readable sections, the book traces the rise and fall of civilizations from antiquity to the present. Sourcing material from across centuries and countries, it examines how the world order is now tilting towards India. It goes a step further to assess the shifts in power triggered by the decline of the West and the rise of the rest.

All very well but will the current leaders, the US, facilitate such a shift in global power? The America First policy might have created the illusion of a revival of US hegemony but, in reality, that country’s crumbling infrastructure and ballooning debt may limit its geopolitical influence, suggests Merchant. Further, the emerging power triad represented by the US, China and India, will be complicated by a web of diverse geographical alliances. All of which means that, at this turning point in modern history, despite economic and military superiority, the three may not be without their own weaknesses and vulnerability.

Merchant’s basic contention is that India is on the economic ascent and is now way ahead of Britain, its former colonizer. As it surges forward, he believes, a majority of Fortune 500 companies will have their capability centers located in the country. Its technological infrastructure and expanding consumer market will provide a perfect ecosystem for these companies to grow. The drivers of economic growth will be spruced up to compete with the best, globally. In this narrative-defining book, all opportunities will be realized in favor of India.

Era of India is an optimistic volume that highlights all that favors the rise of India. Among these is the country’s democratic character. While the US and India have many similar democratic characteristics, China is vastly different from both. Therefore, it is critical to also understand China, which has been the biggest driver of global economic growth in the last 25 years. No country has lifted more people out of poverty faster than China, and it is the only economic power that has moved closer to the size of the US economy. In such a situation, speculations about the new global growth order will, of course, have to include China.

India’s economic rise is presented as a distinct, non-acquisitive model, one that does not enforce colonialism of any kind. The US and China are quite in contrast. While the US exerts its global military supremacy with concurrent trade restrictions, China, on the other hand, adopts a tactical cold-blooded geopolitical doctrine, which is confined to nibbling at territories. Whatever the modern manifestations, it is true that, throughout history, in the quest for economic supremacy, powerful nations have waged wars and inflicted atrocities on other people. Will India leverage its growing soft power any differently? As the cliché goes, only time will tell.

Minhaz Merchant combines history, geopolitics, economics, and demographic sociology to present the civilizational evolution of the concept of the nation-state especially in the Indian context. Era of India is an ambitious undertaking that attempts to capture the finer nuances of change. It is immensely readable but is it really possible to predict the future on the basis of the past? We shall have to wait and watch.

Era of India  

by Minhaz Merchant
PenguinVintage, New Delhi.
Extent: 501, Price: Rs. 999.

Published in Hindustan Times on August 15, 2026.

Are birds' dinosaurs?

Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist whom birds fascinate, because these are attentively smart to solve problems and learn from their mistakes. These are hyperenergetic fast-growing flying machines that have continued to evolve and many of them have adapted into so many forms over millions of years. But what is fascinating are not their avian features alone, because birds are not just birds but ‘living dinosaurs’. A professor at the University of Edinburgh, Brusatte is firm in his astounding belief that birds are indeed dinosaurs. From palm-size hummingbirds to nine-foot-tall patriches, birds are bracing for a future that we may not speculate, 

The Story of Birds isn’t just a book about modern birds but how birds came into being, narrated through a paleontologist’s lens. Brusatte blends his own field experiences with decades of research - from both fossil records and modern bird studies - to trace the full evolutionary journey from dinosaurs to birds. And it seems the journey hasn’t ended yet. While the dinosaurs, the great icons of extinction, may have ended when a six-mile-wide asteroid fell from the sky sixty-six million year ago, their evolutionary journey hasn’t finished. The past isn’t completely past.  

This is well-paced and highly engaging book on the evolution of birds - from their dinosaur origins all the way to the crows we encounter today. It takes us through an anatomical exploration that makes birds unique. For instance, most people who consume chickens, an estimated 65 billion each year, know little about what they end-up dismembering – a bird or actually a dinosaur. Such is the glorious and miraculous presence of birds which diversified and spread across the globe far outpacing mammals during the post-extinction period. 

The dinosaur-bird connection is much simpler to understand. Birds evolved from dinosaur ancestors, and in a genealogical sense are direct descendants, and part of the dinosaur family tree. As scientists classify species by ancestry, Brusatte connects birds with dinosaurs in the same way. Many of the signature features of dinosaur are intact in birds. These can be called by any other name, but birds cannot escape the DNA of their family bloodline. From feathers to wings to big brains and high wire metabolism are infect dinosaur features that birds inherited from their ancestors. With such features, the birds will persist even if the Age of Humans does not.   

Birds are smart and certain types like parrots are some of the smartest creatures on earth. They do more with such small brains as compared with mammal species. Brusatte compares neurons in a bird’s brain with other computer devices: “Birds have more cognitive power than mammals. Their computer chips may be small, but they have crammed more transistors onto them, and those transistors are more efficient”. Neurons in birds use three times less energy than mammal neurons, perhaps because bird neurons are crowded so tightly that they can more easily communicate with each other. Much has to be learnt about distinct anatomical features of no less than 10 thousand species of birds, which gets them unique strength to fight adversities. 

Birds are elegant survivors. They were the only dinosaurs to have endured the asteroid. They navigated global warming, ice age, volcanic eruptions, and fluctuating seas. Because they carry inside them dinosaur DNA, the genes of their ancestors suffered even worse natural calamities. Some birds, notably bald eagle and kiwis, have put their survival instinct to good use. Brusatte concludes that birds are often the first to sense the danger and prepare to counter it. This book is about the history of bird evolution and how it related to dinosaurs.  

The Story of Birds provide definitive evidence that the age of dinosaurs hasn’t truly ended, it has just undergone a rebranding. It is a fascinating, informative and well written book that opens our eyes to the incredible evolutionary journey of birds. Brusatte has a gift for making paleontological history feel accessible and exciting. The author clearly has so much love for his subject matter that the reader can’t help but be captivated. Although written in accessible layman language, it's meticulously annotated, and the chapter notes are likely worth the price of the book.

Birds are the inheritors of 150 million years of evolution, real true dinosaurs, some of the most remarkable creatures that have ever lived. The Story of Birds is an absolutely beautiful experience that leaves with an incredible appreciation for the feathered dinosaurs that live with us.

The Story of Birds
by Steve Brusatte
Picador/MacMillan, New Delhi
Extent: 435, Price: Rs. 899.

First published in Deccan Herald