Maya Ratnam

Emphasis mine

[Utkarsh Sharma @techxutkarsh]

If you have a Gmail account, you need to read this.

Google's AI now scans your emails and attachments, bank statements, tax files, medical letters, all of it. It turned on by default, and there's a class-action lawsuit over how.

Here are 5 moves to shut it off, the switch is hidden in two places:

[Delhi University Teachers @D_U_Teachers]

Sumana Roy (#AshokaUniversity)

Indian Express, 12/06/2026

[Maya Ratnam @RatnamMaya]

Thrilled to have a piece in this book. :)

[Ramachandra Guha @Ram_Guha]

My book “The Unquiet Woods” was first published in 1989, and in an expanded edition in 2009. I am immensely gratified that it has inspired this wonderful new anthology, “India’s Forests”, that takes the field of environmental history much further and deeper.
#WorldEnvironmentDay

[Frontline @frontline_india]

NEW | India’s heat crisis is often discussed as a weather problem. @nagrajadve argues it is increasingly a labour problem. The people who build cities, deliver food, collect waste, and work fields are absorbing the costs of a warming planet first.

https://t.co/ShYh5flDNm

[NityanandJayaraman @NityJayaraman]

Courts of law are graveyards of environmental justice. The Chief Justice of India's comments reflect that people should be wary of equating courts with justice. Elites suffer from a remoteness from reality that they are blind to. CJI is proof of that. https://t.co/2KIMRmIvUY

[Nicolás Dip @Nicolas_Dip]

bourdieu tiene un texto hermoso “¿qué es hacer hablar a un autor? a propósito de michel foucault” donde dice:

“hemos escuchado muchas frases que comienzan con “para foucault" o "según foucault”, “como dijo foucault": ¿por qué y para quién se pronuncian tales expresiones?… quizá se comprendería mejor de este modo lo que se hace cuando se cita a un autor. ¿se le sirve a él o nos servimos de él? ¿no sucumbimos a una forma de fetichismo, a un foucaultismo no muy foucaultiano? recordemos que marx decía "yo no soy marxista". creo que foucault habría dicho contento: "yo no soy foucaultiano". sin duda lo dijo… por eso hay que establecer una relación desfetichizada con los autores, lo que no quiere decir una relación “no respetuosa”. al contrario. pienso que no se respeta suficientemente el esfuerzo de pensar cuando se fetichiza a los pensadores. lo que es importante es el esfuerzo de pensar”

[Maya Ratnam @RatnamMaya]

@twitatreyee @itihaasnaama Omg

[Khushi Kaur @Kaurgeographer]

There is a lovely chapter (among others) by our wonderful Prof @RatnamMaya in this book. Please read!

[Ian Sz 🇵🇸 @KautskIan]

Very few books are half as thorough with every element of the thinkers Matysik engages with

[Dave @GamewithDave]

They removed CD/DVD drives from devices.
They made physical media harder to buy and use.
They removed expandable storage from phones.
They pushed us into streaming subscriptions.
They made always-online normal.
They made unlimited internet necessary.
Then slowly raised the price of everything.

Ownership quietly became renting.

[Yener Çıracı @yenerrciraci]

Yale Üniversitesi siyaset felsefesi üzerine giriş kursu yayınladı. Sokrates, Platon, Aristoteles, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau ve Tocqueville'in temel görüşlerini ele alıyor. Otomatik çevir seçeneği ile hedef dilde altyazılı izlenebilir.

https://t.co/sjYWK7uwhG

[Laura Jaramillo @mtrlgrrrl]

it's wild how much of planning an undergrad class now revolves solely around clever tricks to circumvent ai usage

[Maya Ratnam @RatnamMaya]

@Kaurgeographer Thank you for tweeting! It’s a very interesting volume.

[Siddharth @svaradarajan]

"There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?”

So begins @yanisvaroufakis's powerful and much-needed tribute to @FranceskAlbs, who has not been deterred by American sanctions and Israeli slander from highlighting the genocide in Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians

https://t.co/hLe6px0Eyv

[R.U.P.E @RUPE_India]

[1/2]
Usha Ramanathan writes in her review of 'Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda':

"The project converts people into atomised entities, weakening the potential for collective action. With digitalisation, the ground is being prepared for..."

https://t.co/vUrdrdLnhH

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

6 incredible resources developed by top universities to help you become a proficient academic writer — totally free:

[Reetika Revathy Subramanian @reetiks]

What women’s work songs reveal about the changing climate.
Long before climate science named the crisis, women across the world were registering these shifts in another language – through song. I write for @ConversationUK https://t.co/ZU8I4HFSLJ

[Kartikeya Bhatotia @bhatoti]

Our white paper on extreme heat in India just got published by @HarvardSalata and yes, the timing is rather unfortunately suitable:

https://t.co/ZD7IL9qoNf

[Ankit Mayank @mr_mayank]

This will blow your mind 🤯

Tribals in Madhya Pradesh are holding unique ‘Chitra Protest’ against BJP Govt for stealing their homes & forests

They are covering themselves in mud, holding hunger strike & acting like dead bodies for past 11 days

Their only demands — Land in return of land & proper rehabilitation

They have been living on the same land for 2000 years and suddenly they lost all rights? Really?

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Look at this map.

Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine.

And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet.

The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers.

What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades.

But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions.

A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest.

A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is.

You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one.

In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said.

It chose the numbers.

The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi.

All forests, on paper.

The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped. 

The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion. 

It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning.

The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency. 

I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to.

This is not a technicality. This is the con.

It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement.

For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant.

They did nothing.

Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it.

The BJP is different.

When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it.

The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real. 

Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated. 

The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally.

CONT++