Sunaina Khurana

Meri twacha se mere humor ka pata hi nahi chalta.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

The best thing about the kindle is that you can carry it to the movies with you.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@KiranManral Rooster. Available on Hotstar.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

Hey @MyntraSupport my order for ASICS gel kayano has been delayed with no visibility from your side of where they are and by when I’ll get them. Order was placed > 1 week ago. What will it take to get some visibility into the matter if not the shoes?

[Sick @sickdotdev]

My company’s claude account got exhausted.

Now my legendary manager is asking if we can build our own LLM like Claude to reduce costs😭

[Bagish K Jha @bagishjhaTOI]

Fire at power substation sparks 9-hour outage, 1.5k families in 3 condos hit in Gurgaon https://t.co/BbZWmDLSiU

[Yash Gupta @iYashGupta_21]

@narendramodi 🤴❤️👸 #Melodi

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@SarvamForDevs please have your team get in touch urgently. Our payment for auto debit is not going through and our tokens will expire. I have also dropped a message on your discord channel.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@naushadalir So far I’m enjoying it, 3 episodes in.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

Your Friendship And Neighbours is good. Exceptionally good. Apple TV has suddenly become interesting?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Incentives drive outcomes

[Arnav Gupta @championswimmer]

On the topic of dustbins...

I grew up in Delhi. In 2008 after bombs blasted in some markets and some found in dustbins, Delhi Metro decided to ban dustbins in stations.

"fair enough" I thought - cost of terrorism is this

When I came to London, another city famously devasted with terror attacks in the metro, what I find is they just moved to using transparent packets as bins so it is easy to see what is inside. 🤦‍♂️

When you operate from a point of the bins being non negotiable, you find a solution without removing the bins altogether.

[Ashish Jain @In_Sane_Saint]

You are either a Zepto, Ola, Vodafone, Flipkart person or a BlinkIt, Uber, Airtel, Amazon person.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@SarvamForDevs Yes thank you so much.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@SarvamForDevs hi. I’ve reached out to you guys via email, discord, Twitter - everywhere - with no response. We need to purchase credits for the org I work in and need vendor onboarding information. Please help. You would’ve received an email from [email protected]

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@ajay_2512x Hi. I’ve been trying to reach the developer team via email id provided on website and not getting a response. Need details for vendor onboarding for enterprise version. Please help with this

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Look at the map again. Mumbai is at 32°C, next to the sea. Delhi is at 40°C, almost 900 km from the nearest coast. The sea cools Mumbai. We took Delhi's cooling away by chopping down its trees and pouring concrete everywhere.

Since 2001, India has cut down forest bigger than the entire state of Mizoram. Trees do two things for a city. They give shade, and their leaves release water into the air. Strip those trees away and an Indian city runs 1 to 4°C hotter than the villages right next to it.

Stack ACs on top. India has bought 5 crore air conditioners in just the last five years. But only about 10 out of every 100 Indian homes own one. The other 90 step out into streets that the rich neighbourhoods are heating further with their AC exhaust. Two days ago, all this cooling pushed our power grid to a record. ACs alone now eat as much electricity every evening as 30 big coal plants produce.

In 2024, Indian hospitals saw 40,000 heatstroke cases. The official government count of heat deaths was 110. Across the world, heat deaths are normally 20 to 30 percent of heatstroke cases. That means 8,000 to 12,000 Indians likely died from heat last summer and were never counted. A 2024 study in the journal Environment International estimates the real number is closer to 1.5 lakh deaths every Indian summer.

The Lancet's India report says we lost almost 12 lakh crore rupees in wages to heat in 2023 alone. Farmers and daily-wage labourers lost most of it. They are the ones standing under the sun while the rest of us complain about heat on Twitter from cooled rooms.

Of 37 heat action plans the government has written for our cities and states, only 2 even bothered to map who to protect first. Only 3 had real funding behind them. The rest are PDFs that sit in drawers.

The map shows India is the hottest country on Earth right now. Some of that is bad luck. A lot of it is what we cut down, what we covered in concrete, and what we never bothered to count.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

Indians will never get better because we don’t demand better. We are easily distracted and mollycoddled like toddlers and this is the result.

[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++

[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++

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@AggyAbhishek 🙏🏽 will check. Shukriya

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

How can I get my WhatsApp, slack, chatgpt and Claude all under 1 interface on the laptop to work effectively and not have to keep navigating across windows?

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@jaanebhidoyaaro @gurgaonpolice @cyberpoliceggm The threats were pretty wild. I have my doubts they will be taken seriously though.

[Sunaina Khurana @sunainak]

@gurgaonpolice I got a call from this number where this guy cited a fake loan on my name and offered to get it resolved. When I said no such case he proceeded to use the worst language with me - kothe pe baitha dunga, randi and other stuff I can’t say. What action can be taken?