Peace, power, and the price of life
Hello DoorDesi,
I try not to think about ageing. Both mine and my parents’. I avoid it, postpone it, tell myself there is time. And yet it keeps showing up. In longer pauses on the phone. In medical appointments mentioned casually, almost as an afterthought. This is wholly new for me. Turning 30 has been great but also brutal in many ways.
Living far away has made me aware of a specific kind of guilt. I am building a life I want: work that matters to me, a place that is a choice and not inheritence. At the same time, there is the fear of absence, of not being there when I am needed, of missing moments that won’t repeat. Wanting my own life does not cancel out that fear.
Some days, the tension feels manageable. Other days, it feels like a weight I carry around. The balance between individual ambition and collective responsibility is not something I have figured out. I am still negotiating it, still questioning where duty ends and choice begins.
I don’t have neat conclusions here. If you’re also building a life far from home, how are you navigating this? How do you sit with the distance, the guilt, the love without letting it weigh you down?
Would love to hear from you.
Just the gist
Donald J. Trump, in the most American leader way, has taken on the oh so heavy burden of achieving world peace. And subtlety has never met that man. After having been snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Nobel Committee and creating a scene about it, he has gone all out and announced his very own Board of Peace. A committee that, in his own words, “can pretty much do anything they want (in conjunction with the U.N.“
Our very own Modi ji has been invited to join the board, a board that is supposedly set up to rebuild Gaza, ‘de-radicalise it’, and bring peace to the Middle East. A permanent board seat can be bought for a modest price of USD 1 billion if you do not want your seat for renewal after a 3-year term. Off to a great start!
India is reluctant at the moment. The balancing act of multilateral foreign policy, beating Pakistan in joining the committee, and waiting and watching to see if this is just Trump’s pet project where he is the king, is weighing heavily on India. India is also worried that the attention of this board could very easily turn to Kashmir once it is done with Gaza, one way or another.
➡️ Trump says this is the second phase of the ceasefire agreement but let’s not forget that this ‘ceasefire’ has been violated from the very beginning of phase one. That should tell us everything there is to know about how the second phase is going to go. But I allow myself to be surprised these days.
🔗 Transforming India’s energy landscape
Barely weeks after the government passed the SHANTI Act, basically unlocking the nuclear sector for private players, the draft National Electricity Policy (NEP) 2026 has dropped a not-so-subtle hint that India wants nuclear to become a serious alternative to coal. Right now, coal still runs the show. Not just for the grid, but for factories that generate their own power.
The vision is to scale nuclear capacity from 8.8 GWe today to 100 GWe by 2047 (yes, more than 10x), lean heavily on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), and even allow industries to directly use nuclear power instead of running coal-fired plants.
To solve the money ailment of the power sector, it proposes automatic tariff increments in the absence of new regulations, exemptions from cross-subsidy charges for manufacturers and railways, and a renewed push to stop discoms from bleeding cash.
The framing is very climate-positive so renewables such as solar, wind, and energy storage still get love but nuclear is being positioned as the stable, always-on backup that coal currently provides.
➡️ What remains to be seen is how this impacts the energy bill of households. Privatisation of nuclear power could make Indian products more competitive in the international market by reducing the cost of production but the burden could be borne by regular households that have mostly had subsidised electricity so far.
🔗 Against all odds, making corporate dreams come true.
The prospect of 120 jobs is all it takes to chop down 18,000 trees across nearly 36 hectares of reserved forest in the Brahmapuri Forest Division, a crucial corridor that connects directly to Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve—India’s largest national park. This stretch of forest supports more than 60 tigers and countless other species, many of them dependent on continuous, unfragmented habitat.
The committee appointed by the Maharashtra state government itself strongly advised against it stating mining there would cause irreversible environmental damage, worsen human–tiger conflict, pollute air and water, and ultimately cost the state more in compensation than it would ever gain economically.
But naah! Devendra Fadnavis, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra has decided that the value of 120 jobs - most of them not even permanent roles - is far more than the lives of people and wildlife. Which… given the state of the nation… tracks. Corporate profit for the win.
➡️ Supporters of the project promise roads, water supply, and “compensatory” forest land elsewhere. But forests aren’t Lego blocks. You don’t cut one down and replace it somewhere else and call it even. So this begs a question. Who is development for and who pays for it?
🔗 A fifth of the nation missing from its future plans
No point beating around the bush. Many of us have parents and close family back home who are ageing. I mean we all are… but our parents have reached an age where you notice it, you worry about it.
Well, the government doesn’t seem to worry about it as much. Average life expectancy now is 72 but average ‘healthy life expectancy’ is still a decade less. By 2050, 1 in 5 Indians is going to be over the age of 60. That means a fifth of the country’s population is going to be more dependent on the healthcare system than ever.
The Viksit Bharat roadmap is all about more hospital beds, more nurses, more doctors. But the elderly population needs more than just nurses. More than just hospitals. It needs a pipeline of trained healthcare professionals, insurance companies that understand elderly needs, facilities for late-age care, mental health infrastructure, and community spaces. Basically, life expectancy alone cannot be a marker for development. Healthy life expectancy has to be taken into the scope of work.
➡️ For those with ageing parents in India, what are the things you are doing lately to ensure a healthier future for them?
Trending on the internet
🔗 The man. The legend. The target
AR Rahman is a legend. There is no denying it. Across generations, across genres, across classes. His music is able to evoke something very few artists can achieve. This is the man who gave us Vande Mataram (not the national song) nearly three decades ago. Today this is the man whose patriotism is being questioned because he dared to speak his mind at an interview.
During a BBC Asia interview he was asked about his absence from the Bollywood music scene lately, to which he said that creative choices in Bollywood have moved away from creatives to studio execs these days. He also mentioned that there might be a communal angle to it but that is something he has not experienced directly.
The internet, the master at misrepresenting and jumping to hate, turned against the man (among a few others) who put Indian music on the global stage. Several from the industry came out in support of his comment attesting to the fact that the industry has indeed changed even if it does not have a communal angle to it but not before he had been dragged through the mud by his own country folks. I have first-hand seen comments on Instagram stories that made me seriously wonder what world we are living in.
➡️ Whether you agree with the man or not it is hard to deny that the Bollywood we grew up with has changed. The line between creative liberty and propaganda is blurring. The general quality of scripts, acting, and production is at a low. And even if none of this was true, it bears asking if AR Rahman really deserved this social media trial.
Thank you for reading this far!
With love on behalf of two women who cringe at the mention of chai tea latte,
Sudeshna
Co-Founder, DoorDesi 💃
Housekeeping
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