Blog

Our collective effort
to ruin the planet
and all its inhabitants
is working beautifully.

Congratulations.

The forests are falling,
the oceans are heating,
the rivers are carrying plastic,
the soil is exhausted,
the insects are disappearing,
and the glaciers, quite sensibly,
are leaving.

Progress.

We have become very efficient.

We can destroy in decades
what took millions of years
to create.

That must count
for something.

We cut down forests
and call it development.

We poison rivers
and call it industry.

We empty the oceans
and call it livelihood.

We flatten mountains
and call it infrastructure.

We cover the earth in plastic
and call it convenience.

We buy things we do not need
with money we do not have
to impress people
who do not care,

and then throw those things away
because something newer
has arrived.

Growth, they tell us.

Always growth.

As though a tumour
were not also very good
at growing.

Let us continue
on this glorious path
of consumerism and waste.

Let us manufacture desire,
sell dissatisfaction,
package happiness,
deliver it overnight,
and send yesterday’s happiness
to a landfill by morning.

Why repair
when we can replace?

Why conserve
when we can consume?

Why ask whether we need something
when the more important question is:

Can it be delivered today?

Let our hegemony continue.

Let us remind ourselves
that the Earth belongs to us.

Not the whale.

Not the elephant.

Not the bee.

Not the tree.

Certainly not the child
who will be born fifty years from now.

They have contributed nothing
to the economy.

Every forest is timber.

Every river is water supply.

Every animal is protein, leather,
entertainment, inconvenience,
or real estate waiting to happen.

Every untouched landscape
is clearly suffering
from insufficient monetisation.

And when the consequences arrive—

the flood,
the drought,
the cyclone,
the wildfire,
the crop failure,
the unbearable heat—

we shall look astonished.

Who could have imagined?

Apart from the scientists.

And the reports.

And the satellites.

And the measurements.

And the warnings
repeated for half a century.

But really—

who could have known?

Our hearts will fill
with sympathy
after we have killed them
with our apathy.

We are very compassionate
after the event.

We will light candles.

We will change our profile pictures.

We will write:

Thoughts and prayers.

We will call the dead
a tragedy.

We will call the displaced
unfortunate.

We will call the vanished species
a loss.

And we will carefully avoid
calling any of it
the result of our choices.

That would be unpleasant.

Better to mourn.

Mourning requires no sacrifice.

Apathy is much easier
when followed by sympathy.

It makes us feel human.

Meanwhile,
the last forests can be photographed
before they disappear.

The last coral reefs
can become documentaries.

The last elephants
can be watched in glorious 8K.

The last clean water
can be bottled
and sold as premium.

Perhaps the last tree
will have its own visitor centre,
gift shop,
parking lot,
and corporate sponsor.

Children will queue
to see it.

Please do not touch.

Rare natural object.

Once common.

And then,
when our work is finished,
we shall hand the planet
to our children.

A magnificent inheritance:

warmer oceans,
dead reefs,
burning summers,
failing aquifers,
poisoned rivers,
eroded soil,
mountains of waste,
microplastics in their blood,
and the silence
of everything we made extinct.

Let them have
what we have left them.

Let them repair
what we were too comfortable
to protect.

Let them pay
for what we called prosperity.

Let them ration
what we wasted.

Let them restore
what we destroyed.

Let them explain
to their children
what a forest was.

And when they ask us,

Why?

we can show them
our quarterly growth figures.

Our shopping malls.

Our SUVs.

Our overflowing wardrobes.

Our food thrown into bins.

Our endless upgrades.

Our disposable everything.

See?

We were successful.

Perhaps they will ask:

Did you know?

Oh yes.

We knew.

We had climate models.

We had photographs.

We had satellite data.

We had conferences.

We had treaties.

We had scientists explaining it
again
and again
and again.

We knew enough
to predict the future.

Just not enough
to give up anything
for it.

And that may be
our greatest achievement:

we managed to love our children
while consuming their future.

We managed to pity the victims
while preserving the system
that created them.

We managed to call ourselves
the most intelligent species
on Earth

while systematically destroying
the only Earth
we have.

But fear not.

AI will save us.

It will bring everything back.

The forests,
the reefs,
the elephants,
the rain,
the birdsong,
the rivers running clear.

All of it.

In 3D.

In 4D.

In 5D.

In 4K,
5K,
8K,
and whatever comes next.

Sharper than memory.

Brighter than life.

More perfect
than the imperfect world
we destroyed.

We will walk through virtual forests
without mosquitoes.

Swim through virtual oceans
without salt.

Touch virtual elephants
that cannot trample us.

Listen to extinct birds
sing on command.

We will recreate coral reefs
pixel by pixel
after bleaching the real ones white.

We will manufacture sunsets
after filling the real sky
with smoke.

We will simulate rainforests
after cutting down the originals.

And we will say:

Look.

Nothing was lost.

We have the data.

The reconstruction is perfect.

The whale swims again.

The tiger walks again.

The forest breathes again.

Almost real.

Perhaps better than real.

No smell.

No decay.

No danger.

No inconvenience.

Nature, finally improved.

And our children,
wearing whatever device
we have invented for them,
will stand beneath a digital tree
and marvel at how green
the world once was.

They will hear simulated wind.

Feel simulated rain.

Watch simulated butterflies
land upon simulated flowers.

And perhaps
they will even feel grateful.

What extraordinary ancestors
we must have been
to preserve everything so beautifully
after destroying it.

We will have achieved
the final triumph of civilisation:

reality without reality.

Experience without existence.

Memory without
the thing remembered.

A planet reduced to information
and resurrected
as entertainment.

And we will live inside it willingly.

Because why struggle
to preserve the real world
when the virtual one
can be upgraded?

Why protect a forest
when we can render one?

Why save a species
when we can simulate it?

Why endure reality
when illusion
can be made more beautiful?

And so, at last,
we will arrive
at the ultimate Maya—

not merely the ancient idea
that the world we perceive
may not be what it seems,

but something far more impressive:

a world we know is unreal
and choose to live in anyway,

because the real one
became inconvenient
to save.

So congratulations.

Our collective effort
to ruin the planet
and all its inhabitants
is working.

Let us not lose momentum now.

There is still
so much reality left
to replace.

https://amzn.in/d/0aoOOFQE (India)

https://a.co/d/0csNiiV1 (Global)

Chapter 9: Between Tide and Time

Travel loosens the grip of certainty. Long hours on the road create spaces where the mind wanders freely. Landscapes gradually turn into reflections. As the ride unfolded along the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, I began to notice how deeply one idea kept surfacing, in different clothes, again and again: nothing stays as it is. The land itself seemed to tell that story. Rivers shifted their courses, shorelines advanced and retreated, and towns that once flourished faded or vanished altogether. The great flood of 1341 is traditionally believed to have redirected the Periyar, reshaping the Muziris-Kochi coastline and helping create the harbour that would eventually become Kochi. Ports that once welcomed ships from distant lands now lie silent or buried beneath sand or water. Poompuhar, once a thriving Chola port, has partly surrendered itself to the sea. Korkai, the ancient centre of the Pandyan pearl trade, now sits quietly inland as the water slowly withdraws from it. And at Dhanushkodi, the skeletal remains of a once-thriving town still stand exposed to wind and tide, reminders of the cyclone of 1964 that erased an entire settlement in a single night. Alongside these older upheavals sit others with a distinctly human hand behind them. In many places, beaches have visibly retreated as erosion reshapes the shore. Harbours, breakwaters, and expanding towns alter coastal currents. Fishermen sometimes speak of the sea advancing where it once held its distance. Rising sea levels, though gradual, no longer feel like distant projections but quiet realities along the edges of villages and fields. Even the air near expanding towns and ports feels heavier than what older generations remember. Even the great kingdoms that shaped these coasts—the Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas, Pallavas, Nayaks, Marathas, and the European colonial powers—rose, flourished, and eventually gave way to others. The land and its record of kingdoms seem to move to the same rhythm. What one generation builds, another reshapes. What appears permanent slowly yields to the quiet pressure of time. The coast, in many ways, keeps its own ledger of this. Nothing remains entirely fixed. Even the lighthouses, which appear so permanent against the horizon, have themselves replaced earlier structures, adapting to newer technologies and maritime needs. The more I thought about it, the more I began to sense that upheaval, unwelcome as it may look in the moment, often carries within it the seeds of possibility. Nature offers a quiet lesson here. Evolution itself depends on small variations in the code of life. Most pass unnoticed, but occasionally one allows life to adapt and move forward. Perhaps the past follows a similar pattern. What looks like disorder at first may also be the beginning of something new. Civilisations turn over, landscapes remake themselves, and societies adjust in ways rarely visible while they are happening. These thoughts unfolded against a world that was itself far from settled. When I began cycling through Kerala, the pandemic had only just begun to loosen its grip on daily life. Roads were opening again, yet traces of those shut-in months lingered everywhere. Shops reopened cautiously. People returned slowly to work. Conversations often drifted toward what had been lost, what had held on, and what had quietly become different. And yet what struck me most along the coast was people’s stubbornness in getting on with things. Fishermen had returned to the sea, their boats pushing out once again with the morning tide. Small roadside tea stalls reopened beside the road, welcoming travellers with the same simple hospitality that had long defined these routes. Life had been interrupted, but not extinguished. There was a quiet determination in the way people resumed their routines, as though the land and the sea themselves offered a reminder that ordinary life tends to outlast whatever disturbs it. As I prepared to begin the Tamil Nadu leg, the world was again shaken by events far beyond these shores. Russia had invaded Ukraine. I heard about it in fragments—a line on someone’s radio, a comment traded over tea at a roadside stall—and the distance between that war and this coast felt, at once, enormous and oddly thin. Villages here went on with their morning routines exactly as before; elsewhere, human beings were once again turning against one another. It struck me, not for the first time, how easily war seems to arrive compared to how hard peace is to keep. It doesn’t need agreement from everyone—only enough ambition, fear, or misunderstanding in the right hands to set something in motion that then runs on its own. Yet the places I rode through had absorbed centuries of exactly this—contest and accommodation, kingdoms rising and falling, coastlines and communities remade again and again. Watching the fishermen go about their morning as if nothing elsewhere mattered, I wondered if what we call peace is really just the pause between one such upheaval and the next. What seems to have changed is only the pace. What once took generations to unfold now seems to happen within a handful of years—less the slow work of tide and season, more the restless push of human hands. And yet something else carries across these cycles: what people choose to remember. Each age leaves its trace on the one that follows. These impressions travel quietly from generation to generation, shaping how communities see themselves and their place in the world. Sometimes they survive as songs, stories, and customs. At other times they endure through ritual and worship. And sometimes they persist simply as habits whose origins no one can any longer explain. Along the coast, these traces sit everywhere, side by side. Old temples stand beside new roads. Churches and mosques built centuries ago still welcome worshippers whose ancestors once stood in the very same spot. Fishing communities carry forward rhythms of work that have outlasted storms, trade, and shifting rulers. Yet amid all this, another pattern kept showing itself with equal clarity: people, wherever I went, were fundamentally decent to a stranger on a bicycle. It showed up in directions offered unasked, in tea pressed into my hands, in the pride fishermen took in their boats and nets, and in the plain curiosity of those who stopped to ask where I’d started and where I meant to end up. By the time the ride began to draw toward its close, another set of thoughts slowly surfaced. Although the pages of this book do not dwell on them, there were many stretches that carried real discomfort. Days when fatigue pressed heavily, when the weather turned unfriendly, when the next night’s shelter remained uncertain until late in the evening. Yet again and again something intervened. A stranger appeared or called at the right moment. A sudden shift in weather made the ride easier than it had any right to be. A small decision, made almost without thinking, later turned out to have steered me clear of real trouble. Any one of these, alone, is easy to dismiss as coincidence. Strung together, mile after mile, they were harder to wave off so easily. Was it merely chance? Or was something quieter at work? I found myself wondering, more than once, whether these small mercies added up to a kind of guidance—perhaps even something close to grace, offered without ever announcing itself. The road gave no answers. Only time to sit with the question. Gradually I noticed that my own relationship with not-knowing had shifted. Earlier in life I had usually met a difficulty by pushing back against it, trying to bend circumstance through sheer effort. This ride suggested something quieter. Effort still mattered. So did preparation. But there were also moments when letting go seemed the wiser move, not the weaker one. Perhaps not everything needs to be fought. Some things simply need to be understood. Rather than resisting what looks inevitable, perhaps the better task is to recognize it—maybe even to work with it. The rivers I crossed don’t fight their own bends. The shore doesn’t resist its own erosion and rebuilding. A forest grows, falls, and grows again without complaint. Life, at every scale, moves forward by yielding as much as by pushing. Perhaps a life is not so different. What unsettles us is not always only loss. Sometimes it is the beginning of something else. By the time the final kilometres passed beneath my wheels, these thoughts had settled quietly into me. I hadn’t found answers, nor uncovered any secret buried in the landscapes I’d crossed. But something had shifted. I no longer felt the same urge to brace against every uncertainty. Instead, I began to sense that a life goes best when effort and acceptance move together—working diligently at what is in front of you, while staying open to whatever current is actually carrying you. Throughout the ride, lighthouses had marked my path along the coast. They stood quietly above rocks and sand, guiding ships through waters that never stopped moving. Each one offered a fixed point in a world otherwise being constantly rewritten by wind, tide, and time. Perhaps a life needs something similar. Not a tight grip on every turn of the road, but a steady inner light—something that lets us keep moving even when the horizon itself won’t hold still. And perhaps a kind of peace arrives when we stop treating the ride itself, with all its detours and surprises, as something to be resisted. Like the tides along the coast, it simply unfolds.