Magic at Your Fingertips

We were robbed of it and it is a crime I do not forgive. Covid, that shameless thief, took away the kind physical touch of even the people we didn’t know at all. Let’s be honest: physical touch is the best of the love languages and ever since the pandemic made us weary of being around each other (never mind coming into contact with each other), we’ve expressed that love language even less than before. I will not stand for it.

Physical touch is a deep, primal bridge into each other’s souls and I want to find it again. We owe it to each other to speak this timeless tongue again.   

Covid stole so much love from us—little moments of unspoken connection with faceless strangers. The gratitude you express when you leant forward and gently tapped the rickshaw driver’s tired shoulder when you'd reached your destination. The pure, implicit trust of the child next to you on the plane, when they fall suddenly asleep and rest their beautiful head on your arm, appointing you the cabin crew for their dreams. The shared delirium when you celebrated a last-minute goal at a bar or stadium and you blindly grasp for the nearest bouncing stranger and hug them and jump together in wild ecstasy. The tenderness of the old lady’s palm when you offer out your hand to help her climb the stairs. The unexpected brush with a kindly stranger every now and then reminded us that we are all human.

And what about the camaraderie of a packed Bombay local train car, where the same mass of bodies that moved you—helpless—from platform to carriage, now collectively contorts and parts to let an old man reach the doorway as we near the next station? As individuals, we are each tensed in discomfort; but as a collective consciousness, we instinctively relax our torsos and let ourselves be finessed into new patterns of commuter choreography. A new station looming in window, a new heave and sigh of passengers, a new arrangement of connected limbs forgetting to be uncomfortable. It was one of those innocuous instances of physical touch that Covid took from us. We had taken it for granted and it was taken from us.

We are capable of such profound love and then this evil pandemic stopped us sharing it. It took two years from us – from others, it took many more – but it cannot steal our memories. For seared into our skin is the memory of healing touch from our fellow human beings. We have magic at our fingertips that we must remember again.

Whale Song

I knew I was going to throw up. It was a question of when, not if. I could feel the telltale signs well up from my insides, an unmistakable queasiness I could taste in my mouth. 

We were pitching agonizingly back and forth in our 100-person whale-watching boat off New Zealand’s South Island. I was 14 and I just remember everything being grey. A dazzling grey blur: the inside of our stale old boat was a pathetic plastic grey, the sky above us—visible through great clear glass ceilings—was a chequered grey of thunder clouds and driving rain, and then there was the sea. A glowering grey of dark tumult, heaving and frothing and throwing punch after saltwater punch at our defeated vessel. One more punch would do it. One more punch and I’d empty the contents of my stomach.

I was sitting next to my sister in the middle row of seats, my parents—who were far less groggy than the two of us kids—were glued to their window seats with alert eyes scanning the horizon for a breaching behemoth. It was perhaps a week into our New Zealand holiday in December 2004, just a few oblivious days before the great Tsunami that would change the world. We were doing a classic Bhat Family holiday: driving a modest rental car around a faraway country for 2 weeks, stopping every couple days at a new town to shack up in a quirky youth hostel. I don’t even remember which town we were doing our whale-watching from, I just remember being about to puke my guts out.

The boat would tip backward on the way up a big wave and I’d feel my body rock back. Then the boat would crest the wave and slowly, torturously lurch forward and gastrointestinal plumbing would somersault inside me. I grabbed a paper sick-bag from the pouch in front of me. Another wave and on the way down I felt the air get sucked out of the crowded cabin, my self-control giving way. I felt my lunch come flying up my throat, that awful taste and gagging sensation. I felt so alone in that moment, with half the seated patrons looking outside the windows for whales and the other half looking deep within their souls wondering why they had gotten onto this chunder bucket. 

And then I felt a hand on my forehead. A beautiful, cool, soft palm gently settled on my face and I was not alone any more. The woman next to me, a total stranger, was smiling at me with one hand on my sweaty forehead and the other lovingly patting my back. I will never forget the feeling of her hand, the pure love in her touch.

I looked at her: She must have been in her mid-50s, a little older than my mum. She had short, thinning, greying brown hair—the only grey I remember fondly that day. She wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a colorful shawl slung across her shoulders. Her husband, sitting in the next seat, was also looking at me with concern and care. I don’t know what made her reach over and hold me, but I thank her with all my heart. I thank her to this day.

“Shh,” she said reassuringly, “It’s OK. It’s OK”

I never got her name, I wasn’t even able to splutter a “thank you”. I just glanced at her every few seconds when I would open my eyes for a moment. She made sure I was OK for the rest of that afternoon. She wouldn’t let the storm take me. 

When I feel like life is throwing me around and I’m dodging punches from the deep, I think about how nice her palm felt in that moment. A bolt of the peaceful light that cut through the grey cacophony. That moment, that feeling, has stayed with me for many years because she showed me how humans’ capacity for unconditional love and kindness can rescue us from the churning grey seas. 

A Grandfather’s Lullaby

My ajoba was my first best friend. By about four years old I knew that he, 60 years my senior, was also actually just a silly boy like me and that we would be friends forever. My ajoba—my paternal grandfather—and I had an unspoken bond that I cling to even now, years after he’s passed. My ajoba taught me not just how to climb trees and how make bows & arrows from sticks & string, but why it was so important to run and jump and explore and stand up for those who have less. Whatever positive masculinity I have in me, I attribute a lot to my ajoba. 

We would visit him and my grandma—my dadima—in Bombay every year around Christmas. Up until I turned 10, ours was the perfect friendship. He was still young enough that the youth in his body could keep pace with the youth in his spirit. And I was young enough that I didn’t care for today’s electronic opiates or touchscreen narcotics. This was a time before eye phones and face books. An afternoon at Juhu beach was enough. We would find games to play, we would create little challenges to complete. Bombay was our playground and we would play till the sun went down. 

And then the evening came around and Shambhu and I would be pampered by our two doting grandparents. Even the modest rice-and-daal meal was dressed up to make us feel special. After dinner, after singing our evening prayers, it was time for bed. It was time for the biggest treat of them all. 

Sometimes we would sleep on the bed in the second bedroom, sometimes on the rickety old cots in the living room, and sometimes on a gadda right on the floor—it would depend on how many people would be in the Bandra house that evening and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because wherever we would sleep, dadima would tell us bedtime stories and ajoba would send us off with one final indulgence: his fabled head massage. 

For generations, my ajoba has given these magical head massages to kids in the family. My dad got them, my aunt got them, and we got them. Ajoba had these hands, you see. They were powerful and meaty—the base of his thumb like a chicken drumstick. But they were also soft and full of love. So, when he put his hands on your head, something magical happened. You would be asleep before you knew it. Out like a light, before your mind had enough time to fathom dreaming. 

He would spread his fingers through your hair and bring them back together again. He would squeeze all tiredness from your shoulders and pour it into your sleep, like someone ringing the water out of a washing cloth. The best ones were when he put coconut oil in your hair at night. Ajoba’s head massage was the ultimate expression of love to his kids, his grandkids, and anyone else lucky enough to be his friend. I don’t know who gave him his head massage, but I do remember one day being lucky enough to return the favour.

I wish I had given him more when he was around—just a little bit more than I did. I wish my hands could remember what it was like to send him off into blissful starlight, the way he dispatched us. 

At the end of a hard day, when I am full of anxiety, sadness, anger or confusion, I try to remember ajoba’s magic head massages. I try to remember being a boy, sleeping next to Shambhu on a balmy Bandra evening, knowing that I would wake up again, tomorrow, to another day of endless love form doting grandparents. Ajoba’s head massages were telling a child that they are held, today, tomorrow and forever. His hands ruffled through your hair, whispering that the playground is open tomorrow as long as you let your inner child out to play in it. I remind myself, when I can, that I am still my inner child and that there is always a playground open tomorrow if I let myself seek it. 

All the peace you’ll ever need

And yet all those lovely feelings–the stranger’s kind palm on my forehead and my grandfather’s doting head massage and everything else–do not even come close to the cosmic comfort of laying in bed holding close a woman you love. It is the greatest feeling in the world and there aren’t enough words in all the love languages to describe it. There is no safer refuge in this universe, no moment more utterly transcendent. It is all the peace you’ll ever need.

The gentle curve of her hips, the quiet small of her back. How you can whisper something in her ear and feel her sigh in happiness and cling to you that little tighter. I love the smell of her hair when she rests her cheek on your shoulder. How nice it feels to kiss her forehead. In those intimate moments, lit only by the glow and drizzle of the distant city out the window, the two of you are all that exist. You hold each other for long enough and your bodies connect at a level your minds couldn’t fathom. Human beings were designed to touch each other, to hold each other. You learn how her breath sounds when she’s smiling; you don’t need to open your eyes. I love the sound of her smile.

I have no story to tell because it’s a feeling that needs no story—not one bound by words anyway. If you have someone to hold tonight, just hold them that little closer and make them smile. How lucky you are.

3 Ways “Normal People” Can Fight Climate Change

When you work at a climate NGO, you get asked the same question by your ‘non-climate’ friends and family: “So, what can I do to fight climate change?”

It can seem like a daunting question, until you break it down to specific groups of people: what a Fortune 500 CEO can do is very different to what 'ordinary' people can do. School teachers and truck drivers and accountants and dentists and tattoo artists and midwives have a different role to play than a Prime Minister. (If you’re a CEO or a Prime Minister and you’re somehow reading this, please close your browser immediately and have your staff call me – we need to talk.)

For everyone else, here’s my (slightly controversial) 3-step guide to saving our climate:  

1.     Enjoy your life

Please enjoy your life. The world is trying to heal from a horrifying pandemic, Europe is at war, the new Lord of the Rings TV series sucked, and we all face myriad personal traumas in our everyday lives. Many people are burnt out, struggling to get through to the end of the day, week, month. You are not responsible for the climate crisis so do not feel responsible for it. You are also not responsible for decarbonizing the global economy, though if you want to work in the climate space, consider joining a climate-focused organization.

The reality is a handful corporate and political leaders made the big decisions that got us here – and there’s a handful who can get us out. Let go of your climate guilt. Live responsibly and in a way that feels right to you, but please be kind to yourself and give yourself a break. The climate movement needs you feeling happy and excited about the future we're building.

Please book the holiday that gives you something to look forward to. There’s no point in foregoing a holiday because you feel guilty about your flight’s carbon emissions; airline CEOs have watched as their planes fly literally thousands of empty aircraft just to keep their landing slots. They should feel guilty about their aviation carbon emissions, not you.

Go on that holiday. Be present and care for your friends and family. Please enjoy your life.

2.     Campaign in your workplace

You may have read one of the many “What can you do to fight climate change?” listicles that prescribe taking fewer flights, using paper straws, composting and so on. You should do these if they bring you joy.

But their message is somewhat misplaced, in my opinion, because it shifts the onus of solving climate change from powerful organizations to you (the individual).

If you use a paper straw instead of a plastic straw, and then millions of other people miraculously also eschew plastic straws, perhaps it’ll send a market signal to Big Straw, which could maybe decide to make less plastic straws and stop lobbying for plastic straw tax breaks and maybe even find a way to recycle them. But that sequence of events may take years. It may not have a big climate impact. It may not happen at all.

You know what’s faster? If Big Straw – or airlines CEOs or environment ministers or whoever – chose to act today.

Business leaders always had the power and now they have the impetus. From their funders and their employees to their children and their customers, many corporate executives have been given a thumping mandate by their stakeholders. You can give them an extra push, by campaigning for your employer to make smart business decisions, like buying their electricity from cheap, renewable energy projects. Here’s one such “Personal Guide to Corporate Climate Action”.

Figure out, without risking your job, how you can help your company’s leadership take climate action. Nudge them as best you can. After that, it’s on them.  

3.     Vote for climate leaders

If you are lucky enough to live in a democracy, you should vote for the political candidate that has the best climate plan. Ask candidates how they plan to reduce their constituency’s emissions 50% by 2030 and go to 'net-zero' emissions by 2050. Is their plan backed by scientists? Is it going to bring long-term investment and good jobs to your community?

Around election time, search for online resources comparing candidates’ climate plans, and then cast your vote and/or campaign for a candidate with a robust climate-plan. If your leader is a climate laggard, vote them out.

Remember that you can only do so much to save our planet. This doesn’t mean you’re powerless. It just means that you should focus your efforts in ways that are realistic and nourishing. You should trust that powerful leaders (prodded by plucky climate NGOs) can pull the big levers of change. And meanwhile, you should optimize for your kids' happiness.

Dispel that climate doom. We’re going to solve this together.

(And if you’re a CEO or a Prime Minister and you’re still reading, please call me right now.) 

5 Big Bags of Money that Could Fight Climate Change

I think about climate finance in terms of “big bags of money”. These are sources of capital where a relatively small number of decision-makers control relatively large sums of cash. (Please forgive the public policy student in me for applying the 80:20 rule to everything.)

The biggest misnomer in climate finance is that we don’t have enough money to pay for all the wind farms and seawalls and microgrids and crop insurance and jobs training and political campaigns and electric cars and lithium mines and transmission lines and Netflix documentaries that we’ll need to fight climate change. Don’t get discouraged. We actually have plenty of money.

From Monday to Friday I try to steer the $100+ trillion that the world’s largest financial institutions have committed to “net-zero emissions”, to net-zero emissions. Getting that money out of a bank in Singapore and into a solar project in Senegal is really hard because we don’t seem to have climate-focused projects & companies “ready” to receive it. If you want to do something about it, I suggest you start or join a renewable energy project developer like Enel Green Power, EDP Renewables, etc.

Today though, let’s forget those big global financial institutions and their armies of lawyers, accountants, and consultants. Let’s just daydream about how much money is twiddling its thumbs on the sidelines.

Bag 1: The New York City Police Department (NYPD)

I live in New York—and you probably live in a big city too—so let’s start local. The NYPD has an annual budget of $11 billion. New York City (population 19 million) spends about the same amount on its police as Poland (twice the population) spends on its entire military. There are many nuances to consider, but you can see the point I’m making. New Yorkers do not need the equivalent of the Polish army to protect us.

There is clearly excess in the system and the Mayor of New York should invest that excess in protecting us against climate change. They figured out how to cut $300 million from education and social services, while growing police funding. So, let’s imagine we took even $1 billion off the NYPD budget every year (leaving them with $10 billion) and put that towards climate investments. Experts estimate, for example, that New York needs at least $1 billion/year to help low- to moderate-income households decarbonize their homes.

Think about your city’s budget and all the funds that could be better used. We have the money. Let’s put it to work.

Bag 2: The S&P 500

The 500 largest companies on the stock market are sitting on $1.9 trillion in cash. This is not money invested in new factories or given back to those few lucky enough to be their shareholders. From what I can tell—and I’m no stock market expert—almost $2 trillion just seems to be loitering on their balance sheets, earning a pretty meager return.

$2 trillion is an unfathomably large amount of money. Our brains are not designed to think about numbers that big. Let’s put it in context: it would cost us $5.2 trillion – $6.1 trillion to decarbonize the world’s entire iron & steel sectors. Just think about those enormous mines and furnaces and steels mills and then the galaxies of wind & solar farm’s we’ll need to power them; half of that could be paid for with the cash sitting in 500 corporations’ checking accounts right now. I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing; I’m sure there are reasons why CFOs are reticent to invest their cash in climate solutions. But let’s not pretend like we don’t have the money. That’s not an excuse.

Bag 3: University endowments

The top 10 American university endowments total around $280 billion. Auditors forecast that the collective endowments of the prestigious Ivy League universities could surpass $1 trillion by 2048. They are set up as “charitable non-profits”, meaning they get federal, state, and local tax benefits that you and I probably don’t. Despite their incredible bank accounts, cozy tax status, and generous financial aid policies, they still charge many students tens of thousands of dollars a year: Ivy League students in 2019-2020 paid an average of $22,500 after financial aid.

I am a grateful graduate of one of those institutions, Yale University. Yale provided me a generous partial scholarship to attend graduate school from 2015 to 2017. Five years later, Yale’s endowment has grown to a staggering $42.3 billion—and they never miss an opportunity to ask us alumni for donations. What is all that money for? When will it be enough?

Some simple, silly math to make a point: a 7% annual return on $40 billion is $2.8 billion. Yale has 6,494 undergrads, 8,031 grad students, 5,118 faculty, and 10,534 staff. That’s 30,000 people. Yale could afford to give each of those 30,000 people $93,000 a year just using the $2.8 billion interest accrued, and still keep its $40 billion. America’s biggest offshore wind farm—pretty close to Yale on the North Atlantic coast—will cost $3 billion. Yale could fund one of those magnificent projects entirely on its own every single year and still keep its $40 billion safely tucked away for a rainy day. That is the scale of the money sitting across endowment portfolio managers’ fingertips, while students sit in elegant classrooms drowning in climate anxiety.

Bag 4: Billionaires

There are 2,668 billionaires on earth and their collective wealth is $12.7 trillion. We need $125 trillion of climate investment by 2050; one tenth of that could come from billionaires alone. 2,668 decision-makers. 2,668 decisions to do something extraordinary, the way Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard just decided to give away his $3 billion fortune to fight climate change, or the way MacKenzie Scott has given away a sensational $12 billion to many worthy causes in just a couple years.

They don’t all need to give away all their wealth. Maybe they all just agree to cap their wealth at $1 billion and give anything on top of that? A billion dollars is more money than someone could spend in five lifetimes, let alone one. If you gave me $1 million I would be pretty chuffed, and my already comfortable life would be even easier. I honestly cannot think what I could spend 1000 x $1 million on or why I’d just hold onto it. The thought of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, having $250 billion makes my head spin.

The 20^th poorest member of the Forbes rich list, Charles Koch, has $53.4 billion. So, everyone above him could give away $50 billion and each have over $3.4 billion remaining. $50 billion multiplied by 20 is $1 trillion. That’s enough to fund all of Africa’s $190 billion/year climate & energy investments between 2026 and 2030.

Many of these billionaires would tell us not to equate net worth with annual spending, that their businesses already do lots of climate action, and that governments should be solving climate change. Respectfully, I disagree with all of that.

Bag 5: The US military budget

I am so excited about the US passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which should put $369 billion towards climate investments over 10 years. For context though, the US has spent more than that on its military each year, for the past 20 years. Again, perspective here is crucial: the US government will direct on average $37 billion for climate annually while spending close to $800 billion on its military next year alone. We must examine our priorities.

I have two degrees in international relations; I understand the role of the US military in the world. The US military budget may be the biggest, most controversial money bag of all, because unlike the last three bags we dreamt about, this one gets emptied and refilled every year. Since I moved to America, I’ve come to realize that the US military is a domestic jobs program, providing steady employment to millions of people from all over the country. The US military’s appetite for taxpayers’ money has been insatiable: the defense budget increased 1.08% in 2016, 5.53% in 2017, 7.6% in 2018, and 5.98% in 2019.

The 2023 budget request of $773 billion is a $30.7 billion (4.1%) increase from 2022. Think about what that $30 billion could do instead of building fighter jets. $30 billion could alleviate flood damage in Pakistan, where 32 million people are now displaced, for example. The US has provided $50 million in disaster assistance to Pakistan; that’s million, with an “m”. I wish I lived in a world where that “m” was a “b”.

 

The time has come to redirect these big bags of money by directly engaging with the few people who hold the purse strings. It will need to be done pragmatically, by placating those who must be placated and starting with the lowest hanging fruit. But it must be done. I am tired of being told we don’t have enough money to make the world better. Let us be honest: we don’t have enough will.

3 Game-Changers that Give Me Climate Hope

Welcome to the 2nd quarter of the Decisive Decade—the 10-year period between 2020 and 2030 in which we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50%. Though we’re still far away from transforming global energy systems, three recent game-changing developments should give us hope. These are examples where the “rules” governing a system just went out the window and our assumptions must be re-evaluated. It’s not a market cycle, it’s the market shifting altogether.

1.      Renewables freed from the PPA: US solar developer Intersect Power has done something that fellow renewables developers have been dreaming of and few have achieved. Intersect has convinced its investors that it can build and finance solar projects without long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs). The rule for renewables development had generally been that private financiers need stable, long-term PPAs in order to lend against a project. Not anymore, it seems.

PPAs basically ensure a project will always get paid for the electricity it generates, essentially guaranteeing investors they’ll make their money back if the project delivers. PPAs have been the lifeblood of renewable energy revenues around the world. However, many other types of physical infrastructure are financed without long-term revenue contracts. Take real estate (or even fossil fuel-fired power plants), where funding is provided on the basis of projected (rather than contracted) revenues. In the power sector, selling your electricity based on real-time market prices is called selling “merchant”, and financiers have thus far been reluctant to give any credit to volatile merchant revenues, preferring to stick to the safe waters of PPA-backed cash flows. Intersect’s recent fund raise means that investors are willing (or perhaps forced?) to credit merchant revenues too. Let's hope Intersect sparks a new wave of merchant finance!

If the rest of the market (i.e. both developers and investors) also move in this direction, we’ll have a much bigger renewables market. Developers will no longer be constrained by having to secure long-term PPAs (often the most difficult part of project development). They will be able to find a good site, get their permitting, and take their chances on the open market, betting that power demand will go up as we electrify everything from cars to homes. They will be able to raise more money from more investors and hopefully construct more renewables. This would be a net-positive for the climate.

2.      Banks are giving out renewables development loans: The rule was that banks really only wrote cheques for wind & solar projects when they were "fully de-risked", but that is hopefully changing. Banks are risk averse; they don't really care if a project increases in value, they mainly just want to be paid back. And so they used to finance renewable energy plants only when the project had been de-risked and was "shovel-ready", i.e. when the developer had secured a PPA, finished permitting, and everyone was ready to start construction. But this left developers with a big problem: where would they get the money to de-risk projects? To take projects to construction?

A renewables developer has a very difficult job. To get a project ready for construction and set for project financing, they must walk a years-long tight-rope, pulling together the exact right set of documents and approvals at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way. There are expensive feasibility studies and costly engineering reports, non-negotiable PPA deposits and steep grid interconnection fees. Doing all that unsexy "development" work takes time and money. That money usually comes in the form of equity from their owners and that equity is limited and expensive. They would much rather have flexible, low-cost debt from their banks.

Banks have largely been weary of giving out these development loans because they are riskier than loans backed by advanced-stage, contracted, shovel-ready projects. What if a developer's early-stage project pipeline doesn't come to fruition and the bank foreclosed? It doesn't want to own an early-stage portfolio; it's not in the business of developing renewables projects! It would rather not foreclose on anything, but if it had to, at least an advanced-staged project would be easier to sell onto someone else and get over the finish line. Well, with Arevon securing its $400 million green loan, that dynamic might have changed. It seems there's more and more pressure on banks to fund renewables and so developers might finally get their development loans. This would enable them to build more clean energy projects and that would benefit us all. Let's hope the Arevon deal opens the floodgates!

3.      The US is building factories again: As long as I can remember (and I’m a millennial... so it’s not that long), the rule was that you didn’t build factories in rich countries like the US because labor was too expensive. On the back of your iPhone it said, “designed in California, made in China”. American multinationals reaped the benefits of globalization by outsourcing labor-intensive manufacturing to the developing world. For years, shareholders, corporate executives, and consumers rejoiced, while American labor faced decreasing real wages and former industrial regions were abandoned. We all saw the political backlash materialize in 2016.

But now American factories are back and they’re set to spring up in her heartland. According to a recent Bloomberg report, “the construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year”. And these billion-dollar factories of tomorrow can help us fight climate change:

• LG and Honda just announced a $4.4 billion US electric vehicle battery factory while Toyota is planning a new battery plant in North Carolina.
• The US Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office recently announced a $2.5 billion loan for a battery manufacturing facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan, belonging to General Motors and LG. It is an example of the US government directly supporting domestic manufacturing. Long may it continue.
• A slew of massive new solar manufacturing facilities were announced both before and after the landmark Inflation Reduction Act. It shows this trend began even before policy support really kicked in.

Factories like these are often accompanied by welcome announcements of job creation – a boon for local politicians, especially leading up to mid-term elections. However, those very policy-makers are also sometimes criticized for giving away too much taxpayer money to attract these hugely profitable, multi-multi-billion dollar global corporations. What is the right balance? When does the tax break justify the job creation? How much should American households pay to bring back factory jobs from China? From an emissions perspective, subsidizing electric vehicles and renewable energy is a far better (and far smaller) use of taxpayer money than the $5.9 trillion that goes to subsidize fossil fuels every year. As a US taxpayer I’d want my taxes subsidizing climate-focused manufacturing. And if those clean energy factory jobs get politicians re-elected, great. It'd show democracy functioning.

Which rules can we break next?

Many rules are being re-written and this is a sign of effective advocacy, policy-making, and corporate decision-making over many years. We need to see rule-changes in other seemingly intractable systems too. There are many "rules" I would like to see broken:

• Politicians can’t win election (or re-election) on a platform of climate action
• Building transmission lines will continue to be an expensive nightmare
• Solar panel efficiency will remain stubbornly stuck at 20-odd percent
• EV charging will never be profitable
• New nuclear plants are too expensive and complex to build
• Batteries can only store power for a few hours
• Carbon capture doesn’t work nor scale.
• Earth doesn’t have the minerals in the ground (or processing capacity) to build the renewables/cars we need.

The list is endless and I'd love to hear your suggestions. Rules are meant to be broken and these are all rules that we must break. We are at the foothills—the ankles—of many an S-curve and that’s why progress can seem slow and things can feel hopeless. Do not lose hope. These three game-changers show how fast systems can transition when their constituent parts are lined up correctly. With smart policy-making and proactive corporate citizenship, we can change the game, defeat climate change, and build a better world. Buckle up for Q2 of the Decisive Decade. What rules are you going to break?

Reconciling My Edgelord Phase and the Awful Men I Validated. Oh God, What Was I Thinking?

Every guy has an “edgelord phase”. I think it starts during our “long hair phase” and extends on for years, in many cases never actually ending at all. Edgelords are men who like to be edgy and provocative, because it seems fun to be different and stand out from popular culture. It scratches the iconoclastic itch latent in each us. Edgelords use offensive humour to shock people, thinking that we provide a value to society simply by engaging in unnecessary debates – debates often built on the backs of ridiculous strawmen.

I think this phase starts in high school and accelerates in college, when we’re exposed to an unfiltered cascade of new ideas (and other, more powerful edgelords). Your idiot 14-year-old nephew who thinks that 9/11 was a hoax because he watched a YouTube documentary is an edgelord. Your 40-year-old uncle who asks every year, without fail, “why don’t we have men’s history month? Or a straight pride parade?” - yeah he's an edgelord.

Edgelords live among us, their oily neckbeards embodying the spirit of this cartoon in every Whatsapp group and dinner party:

This week, we heard the collective guttural screeching of the internet’s cringey edgelords reach a new crescendo, as they celebrated the Johnny Depp thing and then raced over to racially abuse a black actress cast in the new Star Wars. Research shows that over 97% of men are affected by Cringey Edgelord Syndrome (CES) and vaccines are yet to receive FDA approval.

But where do edgelords get their ideas from? Who replenishes their weekly bile repositories? Edgekings. Edgekings are the high priests of modern toxic masculinity, supercharged by vast, garish social media followings that they in turn endow with Right wing talking points, conspiracy theories, misogyny, and more. I’m talking about the Joe Rogans, the Jordan Petersons, the Piers Morgans, the Arnab Goswamis of this world.

I remember being a supple, young edgelord and hearing ideas from the edgekings of the late 2000s that challenged my Left / liberal upbringing. They spoke with such ferocity and they seemed to call out things that didn’t make sense to me. But then I would read one article about the topic and realize they were actually completely wrong and, actually, full of shit. Nevertheless, the desire to be edgy stayed with me for many years.

Though I think I have outgrown by cringey edgelord phase, many would argue – probably rightly – that I am in fact still a fucking idiot. As part of my penance, I would like to therefore lay bare my most embarrassing endorsements. Here are three occasions where I quoted, defended, or even supported truly awful edgelords. I’m so, so sorry.

1. Nigel Farage

Yes. I can’t believe it either.

It was 2012, I had just finished undergrad in the UK and returned to India feeling like a failure because I wasn’t able to get a job/visa to stay on in England. Somehow, I had come across a YouTube clip of Nigel Farage berating the European Parliament for something. He said the EU was bloated and inefficient, that Brussels was eating up billions in taxpayer funds to produce very little of substance. It was a perspective I’d never heard and I was fascinated.

I too had no idea what the European Parliament actually did or how the EU worked – and I was a student of international relations in Europe! Mostly, I liked how direct Farage was and how boldly he criticized the bumbling, red-faced Eurocrats sitting opposite him. But I didn’t care enough about European politics to actually spend time learning about it. I just like how he talked.

It was probably August 2012 when I flew from Bangalore to Bombay for a job interview with an international relations think tank. Like the idiot I was, I wrote a full suit for the entire journey, even though I would have had time to change into my suit in Bombay. No one wears suits in India, especially not when you travel. But remember, I was 21 and more importantly, I was a fucking idiot.  

So I show up for this interview and the guy is asking me who my favourite global affairs thinkers and scholars are. I quoted Mary Kaldor, whose work I’d studied extensively at university. And then I said that I liked Nigel Farage because of “how he talks”. The interviewer looked up at me with a strange expression.

I did not get the job.

2. Ben Shapiro

It pains me to say it, ladies and gentlemen. But once I took a girl – a lovely, kind, intelligent, beautiful woman – on a date to a Ben Shapiro talk. It must have been 2016 and Ben Shapiro had come to Yale to give one of his usual lectures railing against liberals and progressive culture. Ben Shapiro is a Right wing radio host who has made a name for himself by shouting slogans like “Facts don’t care about your feelings” at college students and viciously berating various marginalized groups. He’s famous on Twitter and if you don’t know him, it’s because you have led a sensible and happy life and you’re not extremely online. Please don’t look him up, it’s not worth it.

I was excited to go see Ben Shapiro because I was feeling a bit out of place at Yale. When I arrived, I thought I was a Left liberal. I considered myself a progressive, an ally to marginalized groups, an opponent of bigotry, colonialism, etc. I thought I was woke. Oh… my god. I was not ready for Ivy League wokeness. Apparently, Yale was an “white supremacist institution”, according to some fellow students. Halloween costumes were apparently "hate speech". I saw lots of White Americans proudly hating themselves and their country and I found it all bewildering. So I did what any self-respecting edgelord would do: I played devil’s advocate.

Ben Shapiro’s lecture was about how “White privilege is fake” and some other “Leftist myths”. Again, I was fascinated, but not actually in agreeance. In the lecture hall, instead of the usual crowd of 18-22 year old Yale students, it was mostly middle aged locals from the city of New Haven and surrounding towns. They were here to hear the “other side”. And boy did they get it. Ben Shapiro railed for like 45 mins, using cherry-picked anecdotes that don’t stand up to real scrutiny, and rattling off strawman after strawmen to “win” debates against the handful of Yale college students who dared to take the floor mic against him. It was quite a spectacle. An orgy of hurtful, Right wing talking points.

Afterwards, my date and I discussed Shapiro's arguments. She explained carefully and soulfully why she felt hurt and attacked by him. I saw her point, but still felt like her's was a perspective too far Left/liberal for me. I wasn’t ready to accept that Ben Shapiro’s arguments are just vapid abstractions that don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny in the real world, and that real human beings suffer real pain because of the very injustices he tries to laugh off.

I see how profoundly wrong I was. I truly, deeply hate Ben Shapiro. I can’t believe I even breathed the same air as him, sitting there in that cruel auditorium. The very thought fills me with sickness. 

3. Martin Shkreli

You know the “well, actually…” guy who chimes in to provide a badly-researched “contrarian” view that annoys everyone? I was that guy. Many times. But one occasion sticks out in my mind. I wish I could erase it from space-time, but it is permanent. An inerasable disaster. It can never be undone. Like Demonetization.

It was towards the end of grad school and I was in a class on behavioural economics or something. It was a class at the Yale School of Management. Around 50 other students were crammed into the amphitheater-style lecture room and we were talking about moral hazard, adverse selection, tragedy of the commons, and so on. The topic of price gouging in pharmaceuticals came up and it led to an interesting discussion. 

“If we stop pharma companies from maximizing profits, will they still invent the vital drugs we need?” – or something like that. The professor put up a picture of disgraced pharma investor Martin Shrkeli, who had risen to notoriety for increasing the price of a life saving drug by 5000%. He became the pale, sneering face of Wall St excess – even for a hedge fund manager, he was repulsive. The incel’s incel. He was later convicted and jailed for securities fraud but is now back on the streets, probably looking to sell heroin to puppies.

Anyway, yours truly had recently seen an interview with Shkreli where he described why he was being framed by the media and why his raising the price 5000% on that life-saving medication was actually the morally right thing to do. He had justified it quite well, from my memory. What I hadn’t remembered though, were the specific details of why raising the price was in the interest of patients who needed that drug.

And so, right after the professor put Shkreli’s face on the screen, I chimed in with a “well, actually, this whole incident was a red herring and the 5000% increase was misnomer, because… uhh..” and then I could feel the piercing gaze of all the men in the room and I would see all the women rolling their eyes in disbelief. The professor glared at me too, as I stammered and I spluttered my limp retort out into the middle of the lecture hall. It was like Frodo stunned in the gaze of Sauron’s great eye. The professor allowed my answer to just hang there in the air in the middle of that lecture hall, like a pathetic, dying Karp writhing on the floor of a fishing boat.

Why did I have to answer? Why couldn’t I just confine my stupid, uncooked, edgy little thought to the dungeons of man-brain where they belong? How many people in that class went to Reddit right after and complained about me? Oh god. What was I thinking?

 

I’ve tried to learn, in the years since grad school, to keep my mouth shut, to remember that edgy ideas are edgy for a reason – that far more erudite minds than mine have wrestled with them and found them unworthy of further examination. That some Tweets are better left as drafts. That most hot takes are bad takes. I’m sorry again for being a contrarian dick and for trying to constantly “provoke a response” out of people who just want to chill. I will do better, I promise. If you see me being a edgelord, please tell my sister and she will Whatsapp me saying “Shravan shut up” and I will.

The Singing Knights of Flatbush Avenue

Flatbush Avenue is a long, wide, busy road that runs across Brooklyn like a pulsating artery. A great river of concrete, she starts at the foothills of the Manhattan Bridge, flanked by posh neighborhoods and happy green parks and she extends in almost a perfectly straight line, diagonally, through progressively poorer parts of the sprawling borough. 

When you first meet her, near her crown, in prim Fort Greene and picturesque Brooklyn Heights, she decorates herself with tall offices. People don’t live on her. Swanky brownstone townhouses and elegant mid-century apartment buildings watch her from arm’s length, as if to respect her boundaries. At this point, she is far from home, she is just a runway to Manhattan over the water. 

But follow her down into Brooklyn for a little while and she changes. Prospect Park clothes her midriff and she becomes freer, more welcoming, more peaceful. Draped in greenery, air, and silence, she is able to breathe in Lefferts Gardens. This is when I love her the most. 

Eventually she succumbs to the relentless brick and colour and chaos of Flatbush itself, the birthplace that named her. Now she has people living on her hip, families scurrying across her thighs, shopkeepers scaling her knees to set up their fruit carts, smoking teenagers bouncing basketballs round her ankles. Her power spent, this great Goddess now blends into the rest of city. She becomes just another road. 

I am lucky enough to live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, wedged between her waist and Prospect Park, and so I usually get see her happier side – her fleeting, leafy abdomen. On a purple, warm summer night she even lets me hear most sacred hymns. If you listen closely, when brutish engines are fast asleep, construction work has retreated, and the moon glistens from above, you can hear singing. It’s not her singing, it's her guardians. You can hear the singing Knights of Flatbush Avenue. 

Knights in Shining Armor 

Delivery workers are the unsung heroes of modern urban life. You press five buttons on your phone and food magically appears at your doorstep. Your phone spits out an order to a line cook somewhere, and 10 minutes later a waiter brings it to the front of the restaurant. And then at that very moment, no matter the weather or the man’s mood, a delivery driver parks his bike, walks in off the street, picks up your silly salad or precious pizza and brings it across town to you as fast as he can. 

He braves the traffic, the rain, the snow, the wind, the night, the potholes, the rats, the dogs, the confusing building buzzer systems, the weary glares from patrons of fancy elevators, the chance that his bike is stolen, the likelihood that he’ll someday twist an ankle on a slipper staircase, the lottery of an immigrant life, and many other dangers that you and I have long since forfeited. 

How many times have you really talked to your delivery guy? Have you ever had a conversation with the man who brings you noodles when you’ve had a hard day and you don’t feel like cooking? Have you ever wondered what a hard day might look like for him? Have you ever wondered what life would look like if you were delivering dim sum to his home, handing hot, heavy plastic bags to his hungry children? 

I don’t mean to shame you, because I have not honoured these men either. I too have not heard their voices, perhaps because I’m scared of what they’ll say.

 I remember once seeing 20 road-worn e-bikes stacked side by side outside a busy restaurant. That image struck me because I’d never seen so many delivery bikes together at the same time. You usually see one or two. But there were 20 there that day. How many different languages must the riders of those 20 bikes speak? How many different smiles and grimaces and laughs? Laughter sounds different in different languages. 20 men, 20 life stories of courage, hard work, and humility. 20 mothers, 20 wives, 20 decisions to come to America. 20 voices we might never hear. 

This is a love letter to those men, whose courage I will never have. The men to whom we owe our comfort. The Knights of late-stage capitalism, who bring us food we are too lazy even to go pick up, let alone cook. In the winter especially, they look like gladiators of the concrete jungle. With their visors up, their helmets betray wide-eyed glances, even beneath N95 masks. Their darting eyes are eyes of men at work: dinner time for us, when we reward ourselves after a hard day of staring at Zoom screen, is their busiest hour. How hard our lives are: sometimes when Zoom doesn’t work, we have to use Teams! Yes, we deserve the sweet release of Uber Eats. We’ve had a hard day! 

See him standing in the hallway in his suit of armor. His helmet, his winter jacket, the big gloves to keep his knuckles warm, the plastic dagger in his right hand with its brightness set to maximum, a luminous cocktail of Google Maps and delivery apps telling him which kingdom next. If the building’s elevator is broken he climbs the stairs, all the stairs, it doesn’t matter how many. So forgive him his panting, allow him to leave without saluting you. Pay him for his services, thank him for his generosity, and remember that the steam still coming off ramen rises because of him. He keeps your food hot while you stay warm. You are but one damsel he’s saved tonight, he has many more elevator-less castles to storm, more concrete moats to cross. 

Who are these men that ride their iron steeds up and down our ungrateful streets? They fly along both modest Flatbush Avenue and sparkling Madison Avenue. They charge into battle whether it’s a cascading rainstorm or a swirling blizzard. I saw a guy today – trudging through snow knee-high and -15°C with wind-chill – lift his scooter into his shoulder and carry it from the curb to the store front. Someone, somewhere had ordered something; it hadn’t occurred to them that this man would be have to trek through snowfall so new it was still being shoveled and salted by man and machine alike. Someone was blissfully ignorant that summoning their delivery genie would make this Knight carry his horse on his back. They ignored the consequences of that little indulgence and minutes later, our hero was called into action. Among many cruelties our Knights must bear is the cruelty of our ignorance. 

I extend my awe not just to the men who deliver our food, but all the service workers upon whose shoulders we sprout one modern comfort after another. Since I moved to the US in 2015, I have been served by delivery drivers and grocery store workers and Uber drivers and armies of other men and women who have never once – not once – lifted an eye in discontent, raised a voice in indignation, or waved a finger in malice. It is astounding. These heroes, I guess, are mostly lower-income, first-generation immigrants from developing countries who must be experiencing a cacophony of daily stresses I scan scarcely imagine. But I’ve never seen them project it upon a customer or rise to provocation. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite quite regularly. 

I remember an incident in my grocery store, on a sweltering summer day when the community’s patience was already frayed. This lady walks up to the deli counter. She was not wearing a mask – maybe the only person out of 50 in the store walking around like she had some special privilege. The deli counter is not rocket science: you tell the guy what you want. You can even just blurt out the item number of the sandwich scribbled on the blackboard above you. 

But this woman had questions. She was confused and loud and asked a vague, cryptic question about whether she could combine ingredients from one sandwich with another. The guy behind the counter was Latino. He didn’t understand her question but no one, including me, in line behind her understood her question either, because it was a strange and convoluted request. She asked again, with new condescension. Again he looked at her, perplexed, and tried to understand what she was saying. 

“Uhh, can I get someone who speaks English?” she then demanded, turning around as if to elicit agreement from people passing by. I felt a surge of anger. 

I hated her in that moment. Her arrogance, her bigotry. My mask hid my scowl and my cowardice stopped me from standing up for him. But he didn’t need anyone to stand up for him. He responded with the most dignified three words, saying all that he needed to and more. 

He calmly said, “I speak English.” 

Not only had he de-escalated the situation, but he proved his valor and upheld the dignity of his house. Embedded in those three words, was a belief that he was in the right, that his background would not hold him back, that he belonged in that grocery store as much as anyone. She didn’t know what to say. She blathered some profanities, whipped around, and left in a huff. 

That she was African American was not lost on him, me, or anyone else in the store. Had she been white, the episode may have caused a bigger scene. In the end, no one really paid attention and he went back to his business, confiding in his colleagues standing next to him. Beneath the veneer of urban co-existence, the aspiration towards multi-ethnic harmony and racial utopia, lie complex histories and wounds untended. 

Midnight Crooner 

But alas, you were reading this blog to hear about the singing Knights and so I will taunt you no longer. Meet him now, the singing Knight of Flatbush Avenue. The first time I heard him, was a clear night last July. I was walking home from my friend’s apartment on the other side of the park, and I strolled along Flatbush Avenue. 

I love the night sky in a city. A city sky can be totally quiet, but it is never totally black. It is never fully night, it’s only some shade of purple. And a purple sky reminds you that no matter how late the hour, you are not alone. Someone else is always out there gazing up at the sky too; dreams lighting up the darkness. 

It was under this night sky, walking by hue of streetlamps, that I heard him singing faintly as he glided towards me. I was walking on the pavement and I saw him, a shadow in the distance, fizzing in my direction in the bike lane just an arm’s length away from me. E-bike engines create, at most, a low hum and so as this Knight sped near me I could hear him crooning with joyous abandon. 

I think he was singing in Bengali? His phone’s feeble speakers were playing accompanying music and he belted out a sweet serenade at the top of his lungs. He had only one hand on the handlebar, his other was stretched out as if he was the lead in an opera performing for a baying crowd. 

Who was he singing to? Was he serenading Flatbush Avenue or some other sweet maiden? Where was she? When had he last seen her? Had he sung like this when they first met? When would he sing to her again? 

Something had given him the freedom, the audacity to sing that night. In New York City, you are conditioned to occupy only your little slice of airspace, no matter your standing in society. You are taught to stay in your lane, to not intrude upon anyone else’s real estate, and most definitely never to sing. But something had emboldened his spirit that night. It was late so perhaps he was heading home after hours on job and he just needed to release some energy. It was like he’d been biding his time and now the stage was all his. His voice rang out across the empty street, the shadowy park, the purple night air. He didn’t care that I saw him. He wanted the city to hear. 

I remember it to this day because it was the first time I saw one of my beloved Knights without their armor. I caught a glimpse of his face as he zipped past me. He was beaming. Wind in his hair. It was only a second but I saw the joy in his eyes. He was part of this city just like me, just like you. And though he must often wait to sing his piece, we will hear him sooner or later.