By Rebecca Solnit

A monastic once told me renunciation can be great if it means giving up things that make you miserable.

This vision, I think, is what has been missing when we talk about the climate crisis — and how we should respond to it.

Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?

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Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.

Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”

Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.

“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out.”

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posted by f.sheikh

NEW DELHI — On a freezing December day on a remote Himalayan mountain ridge, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought with sticks, stones, clubs and bare fists. Scores were bloodied and injured. The incident, according to the Indian authorities, occurred on Dec. 9, when about 300 soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of China attempted to occupy Yangtse, a mountainous border post on the disputed India-China border in the Tawang area in northeastern India.

Soldiers from China and India, nuclear-armed Asian neighbors, have been clashing on their disputed border with an alarming frequency owing to the rise of aggressive nationalisms in President Xi Jinping’s China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India. Insecurity is also growing in New Delhi and Beijing over intensified construction of border infrastructure by both countries. And mutual suspicion is deepening as China contemplates the increasing strategic cooperation between the United States and India as competition and conflict between Washington and Beijing intensifies.

China and India share a disputed 2,100-mile border, which has neither been settled on a map nor marked on its difficult mountainous and glacial terrain. Broadly, it runs between China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and the federally administered territory of Ladakh in the north. Neither the colonial British authorities nor the leaders of independent India were able to agree on the detailed alignment of a border with China.

A few years after China invaded Tibet in 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India ordered official maps of India’s borders to be updated, and India laid claim to the alkaline desert of Aksai Chin, which lies between its northern Ladakh region and China’s Xinjiang autonomous region. China contested India’s claim by displaying its control and possession of Aksai Chin, where it had completed a strategic highway linking Tibet with Xinjiang by 1957.

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posted by f.sheikh

Here’s some history. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the United States and many European nations agreed to lower the valuation of loans they had provided to the poorest nations — something that is known in finance as “taking a haircut.” Since then, many G-7 nations have been reluctant to provide large loans again, so African and southeast Asian countries have increasingly turned to China and private lenders for funding. China is now the world’s largest government creditor to developing nations, accounting for nearly 50 percent of these loans, up from 18 percent in 2010, according to the World Bank. These Chinese loans were often at high interest rates. It would have been a stretch for poor nations to repay them even in good times, and now it’s impossible after a global pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have decimated low-income economies where people are struggling to afford food.

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