| | | Good morning! | | I am going to focus on redemption in this week’s newsletter – or at least in part of it. But to start off, something that’s the perfect opposite of redemption. PT Usha’s comments on wrestlers protesting the lack of action against the national wrestling body’s chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh for sexual harassment are, at best, a case of being tone deaf and, at worst, a once champion athlete throwing in her lot with a system that rewarded her with position and power. Usha has rightly been excoriated for what she said, but the larger mystery remains Delhi Police’s complete lack of interest in investigating the case – strange behaviour for an otherwise proactive force that has been known to even follow up on throwaway comments by politicians on the campaign trail. Nor has the sports ministry covered itself with glory in its handling of the issue – with its exaggerated emphasis on due process looking more like an effort to protect Singh, a powerful local BJP politician, than anything else. That may come as a surprise to many people – but not those familiar with Singh or Uttar Pradesh politics. On Friday, the Solicitor General of India told the Supreme Court which was hearing the case that Delhi Police would file a FIR in the case. The court also directed Delhi police to the minor who is among those who have complained of sexual harassment, and asked the SG to keep it informed of progress in the case | | THINK The protest by the wrestlers has overshadowed the death of Parkash Singh Badal, and the intense election campaign in Karnataka which will move up a notch, with the Prime Minister scheduled to hit the campaign trail this weekend to improve his party’s prospects in a race in which it is widely seen to be behind – becoming the biggest political story of the week. It was also the biggest sports story of the week, overshadowing the ongoing Indian Premier League. The popular Twenty20 tournament (frowned upon by purists) is all about redemption, and viewers were served evidence of this by an ageing Ajinkya Rahane, whose exploits for the Chennai Super Kings (that shouldn’t surprise anyone; this is a team whose theme should be Marley’s Redemption Song) won him a place in the Indian team for the one-off WTC final against Australia. | | THINK MORE  Redemption of another kind was in evidence in Patna with the release of Anand Mohan, who, like Singh and many others, is proof that while the strongarm (its literal Hindi translation is bahubali) politics that once characterised the Hindi heartland may not be talked about much in the mainstream media, it is still very much around. It was Nitish Kumar’s government that in 2012 changed prison rules to ensure no remission of sentences was allowed for those convicted for killing “government servants on duty”. Mohan was convicted for the killing of a young Dalit IAS officer G Krishnaiah; he was sentenced to death and, on appeal, the sentence was reduced to life. But his appeal among upper caste Rajputs, and the possibility that he could help the ruling coalition’s chances in the 2024 national elections and the 2025 state ones seems to have earned Mohan a release. As HT pointed out in an editorial, politicising the remission process only serves to weaken the rule of law. We could have put it differently – in politics, everyone has feet of clay.  | | KNOW Down in Karnataka, the theme remains redemption – for all three political contenders in the fray, but especially the Janata Dal (Secular), whose patriarch HD Deve Gowda still stands tall as the benchmark for regional aspirations (he ended up becoming the Prime Minister of the country). In an interview with my colleague Vinod Sharma, Deve Gowda, who refuses to describe himself as a national leader, spoke of his party’s chances in the coming elections (it will get a “working majority” he insisted) and a common platform to take on the BJP in 2024 (although he couldn’t resist pointing out that the Congress, his old bête noire, is having trouble even uniting its own leaders). Will the Gowdas soar again? Reporting from Hassan, my colleague Dipankar Ghose wrote about the clan’s hold over the Old Mysuru region. “If the JD(S) holds on to Old Mysuru, there is a hung assembly, and the Gowdas remain the shrewd negotiators they have always been, nothing is impossible,” he wrote. | | LEARN It’s among the most significant developments in science, and even has a dog story for appeal (but most media chose to give it a miss). Thanks to an effort called the Zoonomia Project, covering 240 species across 80 mammalian families, we now have information on how mammals evolved – or “what evolved between species and what didn’t” my colleague Kabir Firaque wrote in HT’s Pick of The Day. In his own words: “Two decades after a reference human genome was published for the first time, science has taken new steps towards investigating how the genome has evolved in relation to that of other mammals -- discoveries that could answer key questions on life and evolution, perhaps even point to cures for diseases, including cancer.” | | READ MORE A Bombay baker’s revenge A snapshot of Britain’s economic decline A SWOT analysis of the BJP in Karnataka A 19th century Russian mathematician and the learning ability of large language models | | OUTSIDE “Are repeat Covid infections dangerous?” an article in Nature magazine asked, echoing a question that many of us have been asking with a resurgence in cases. The author Cassandra Willyard then proceeded to answer the question on the basis of “what science says”. There is still a lot of debate among experts on how dangerous a repeat Covid infection is, but the science, as explained in the article, is clear on a few things. One, current rates of reinfection are low (5-15%, although some of this may have to do with reporting; and the science also indicates that this proportion will increase); two, reinfected people tend to recover faster; and the risks are lower in the case of a reinfection except in people with pre-existing conditions. These are important questions to try and answer as we evolve a future vaccination strategy (something India is oblivious about) – for instance, do we need annual Covid shots like we need annual flu ones? | | WHAT I'M READING There’s something about the way Sri Lanka plays cricket that evokes the West Indies at their prime – and it isn’t just the papare beat at grounds, reminiscent of the calypso. Yet, not much is known about the country’s cricketing history, or its stars (many from the golden generation haven’t bothered to write their biographies, while lesser cricketers from other countries have written and updated theirs). Nicholas Brookes’s An Island’s Eleven seeks to fill the gap – and does so masterfully. Brookes writes about the lives of past greats (such as Mahadevan Sathasivam, considered by many to be the best batsman in the world in his time), the big leap that Sri Lankan cricket made under arguably its greatest captain ever (Arjuna Ranatunga), and the years after – and he does so with passion, a keen sense of nuance for the local culture, and with the obvious energy of a cricket fan. | | WHAT I’M LISTENING TO The new album from The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein. It dropped overnight Thursday-Friday, and I have listened to it only a few times, and while I found that much of the album takes a softer turn than most of their past efforts – to know how hard The National can sound, listen to them covering Morning Dew on the Grateful Dead tribute, Day of the Dead – it still does have two songs that possess in abundance the anthemic quality that first attracted me to their music, Tropic Morning News and Grease in Your Hair. Sure, it features collaborations with Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift, and Phoebe Bridgers (whose album Punisher is an underrated modern classic), but these two songs still stand out and wouldn’t be out of place in the band’s best album (a toss between Boxer and Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers). | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
