Two unrelated news reports emerged this week. The Obama administration deployed its first-ever trade mission to India. The delegation was here to discuss business opportunities in the field of solar energy. The second one in The Guardian newspaper, quoted climate scientists as saying that "it's over" - that the years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed. On current trajectories, the article said, "We'll be lucky to get away with four degrees." Now juxtapose these two reports with the more widely covered Earth Hour, the WWF's effort to get people across the world to switch off all lights for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30 PM on the March 28 to show solidarity for the planet. The UN Secretary-General is calling this, "the largest demonstration of public concern on climate change." Getting a billion people together to vote against Global Warming is unprecedented, so is perhaps the fact...

The first thing you'd probably hear, if you told people that you went to Ladakh are exclamations of awe & envy. A reaction that's not unwarranted. This would definitely qualify as one of the 100 places to visit before you die. Looking back I was lucky, though it certainly didn't feel that way when we were there. We flew into the capital Leh in May, two months before the tourist season kicked in, in time to experience the remnants of one of the harshest winters the region had witnessed in 20 years. The biting cold, the sudden hailstorms, and the relentless wind - we were ill-equipped from the start. Many passes were still closed & supplies in stores were over a year old. Once out of Leh, we survived on biscuits, soup, and condiments that had outlived their expiry date. Breathing is laboured there and that's putting it mildly. We were 15,000 feet above sea level - living on 40% oxygen....

My camera assistant, on the first day of the AutoExpo asked me "yeh jo ek laakh ke gaadi aayi hai, woh petrol ya deisel may launch hui hai?" (he was early by a day). Just the day before, our office librarian quizzed me about "the car". He said he was seriously looking at purchasing one and hoping to cut his petrol bill by half! (Never mind that he already owns a set of wheels). On our way back from a shoot, our cab driver painstakingly laid out the logic: many people in villages and small towns buy the Bullet, that's around 80 thousand rupees a bike, surely they'd want to buy Tata's 1 lakh car? Three stray conversations, and I realise that as d-day draws near just about everyone - not just scoop-crazed journalists - is waiting for the actual launch of this 'miracle' vehicle. Ever since the car got on the drawing board, there have been articles lauding it, and there...

One of our policy roadmaps, and indeed a lot of international pressure on India in the coming days, will revolve around our course of action on climate change. Climate change; that word & its doomsday implications that still draw skeptical guffaws in our newsroom. Going green may sound hip but its not easy to sit everyone down and explain that global surface temperatures are infact rising at unparalleled levels, must faster than they did in the previous inter-glacial period. That the total carbon in the atmosphere 650 thousand years ago was under 300 parts per million, today its crossed 380, & that's not exactly nature going through its usual cycle. That rising fuel prices, water scarcity, farmer suicides, cyclones in Bangladesh, floods in Bihar, and wildfires in California are really part of a larger pattern that are likely to become more frequent & more dire, wreaking havoc on millions of people in the future. And its not possible to prove to everyone that...