Set 1
Everything she wanted was here, at Carignano, in Kasauli. Here, on the ridge of the mountain, in this quiet house. It was the place, and the time of life, that she had wanted and prepared for all her life — as she realized on the first day at Carignano, with a great, cool flowering of relief — and at last she had it. She wanted no one and nothing else. Whatever else came, or happened here, would be an unwelcome intrusion and distraction. This she tried to convey to the plodding postman with a cold and piercing stare from the height of the ridge onto his honest bull back. Unfortunately, he did not look up at her on the hilltop but stared stolidly down at the dust piling onto his shoes as he plodded on. A bullock-man, an oafish ox, she thought bitterly. She stepped backwards into the garden, and the wind suddenly billowed up and threw the pine branches about as though to curtain her. She was grey, tall, and thin, and her silk sari made a sweeping, shivering sound, and she fancied she could merge with the pine trees and be mistaken for one. To be a tree, no more and no less, was all she was prepared to undertake.
What pleased and satisfied her so, here at Carignano, was its barrenness. This was the chief virtue of all Kasauli, of course — its starkness. It had rocks, it had pines, it had light and air. In every direction there was a sweeping view — to the north, of the mountains; to the south, of the plains. Occasionally, an eagle swam through this clear, unobstructed mass of light and air; that was all. And Carignano, her home on the ridge, had no more than that. Why should it? The sun shone on its white walls. Its windows were open; the ones facing north opened on to the blue waves of the Himalayas, flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched upon the sky, while those that faced south looked down the plunging cliff to the plain, stretching out, flat and sere, to the blurred horizon.
Yes, there were some apricot trees close to the house. There were clumps of iris that had finished blooming. There was the kitchen, with a wing of smoke lifting out of its chimney and a stack of wood outside its door. But these were incidental, almost unimportant.
Set 2
In recent years, urban gardening has emerged as a widespread movement in cities across the globe. Prompted by increasing concerns surrounding food security, sustainability, and mental well-being, urban dwellers are reimagining their limited spaces, including balconies, rooftops, alleyways, and windowsills, as viable sites for food cultivation. At the heart of this shift lies the desire for fresh, organic produce, especially in cities where access to pesticide-free food remains both costly and inconsistent. By growing their own fruits, vegetables, and herbs, individuals can reduce their dependence on commercial supply chains, which often entail extensive transportation, energy consumption, and synthetic chemical use. This not only empowers consumers to take control of their dietary choices but also enhances awareness about nutrition, food origins, and environmental impact.
Urban gardening is also lauded for its ecological contributions. Plants in urban environments combat the urban heat island effect, a condition where metropolitan areas are significantly warmer than their rural counterparts due to concentrated human activity and infrastructure. Vegetation improves air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, while also managing rainwater runoff and reducing pressure on often-overburdened drainage systems.
Yet, the advantages of urban gardening extend beyond the tangible. On a psychological level, cultivating plants offers therapeutic benefits, including reduced stress, improved mood, and greater mindfulness. In the high-speed urban landscape, tending to a plant provides a rare opportunity to engage with nature, fostering patience and a sense of achievement. For many, these small pockets of greenery represent not just a practical solution but an emotional and symbolic reclamation of space and agency.
However, urban gardening is not without its limitations. Scarcity of space, inadequate sunlight, and poor soil quality pose significant hurdles. In response, gardeners have turned to innovative methods such as vertical farming, hydroponics, and compost enrichment. Moreover, community gardens in shared spaces have flourished, enabling collective effort, resource sharing, and social cohesion. While urban gardening may not supplant industrial agriculture, it marks a meaningful shift toward more localized, responsible, and connected living, an act as much philosophical as it is practical.
Set 3
Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas.… If education were identical with information, the libraries are the sages in the world and encyclopaedias are the rishis. Getting by heart the thoughts of others in a foreign language, stuffing your brain with them, and taking some University degree, you consider yourself educated. Is this education? What is the goal of your education? Open your eyes and see what a piteous cry for food is rising in the land of Bharata, proverbial for its food. Will your education fulfill this want?
We want that education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one’s own feet. What we need to study, independent of foreign control, are different branches of the knowledge that is our own, and, with it, the English language and Western science; we need technical education and all else that will develop industries so that men, instead of seeking for service, may earn enough to provide for themselves and save against a rainy day. The end of all education, all training, should be man-making. The end and aim of all training are to make the man grow. The training by which the current expressions of will are brought under control and become fruitful is called education. What our country now wants are muscles of iron and nerves of steel, gigantic wills, which nothing can resist, which can penetrate into the mysteries and secrets of the universe and will accomplish their purpose in any fashion, even if it meant going down to the bottom of the ocean, meeting death face to face.
There is only one method of attaining knowledge. It is by concentration. The very essence of education is concentration of mind. From the lowest to the highest man, all have to use the same method to attain knowledge. The chemist who works in the laboratory concentrates on elements to analyze them. Knowledge is acquired by concentration.
Set 4
The crisis of justice that is the subject matter of discussion in the media today is, in fact, the crisis of “justice for the middle class.” The main difference between India and the OECD countries is that, whereas the middle class in these countries has reasonable access to justice, in India it does not. A vocal and powerful middle class has emerged in India since 1991. It is demanding reasonable access to justice. Much of the judicial reform effort will help meet this demand.
The question of justice for the poor is, however, an altogether different challenge. No country in the world has been able to secure justice for the poor. Most of the jails of the richest countries are filled with the poorest. The “masses” are more often victims of the criminal justice system than of crime. In India as well, jails are almost exclusively filled with the poor. The civil justice system is hardly accessible to them. They are often victimised by lawyers, touts, and court staff. They are docket-excluded, a new type of untouchability. The language and the logic of the judicial system are alien to them. It rarely takes cognisance of their needs and interests.
Their main concern, therefore, is to escape the attention of the justice system, criminal and civil. A landless Dalit person in the interior of Madhya Pradesh once gave me an insightful definition of a court from the perspective of the masses: “A court is a place where you are forcibly taken by the police to be punished; no one goes to a court.” In contrast, many lawyers and judges colloquially define a court as “a temple of justice where rights are protected.”
These sharply divergent visions mean that justice for one section is often injustice for another. Protecting the livelihood of traditional taxi and auto drivers from predatory pricing by corporate app-based taxi providers by imaginatively using the available tools of law to delay their incursion would be seen by the rich and by sections of the middle class as a failure of the judicial system, and possibly also as resulting in a downgrading of the “ease of doing business” measure. However, the masses would see such a judicial intervention as strong evidence of a good justice system. Although the conflict over competing visions of the nation and conflicting demands from social and economic segments have confined judicial reform of judicial administration mainly to “neutral” areas such as process reform, procedural law, technology, planning and court and case management, judge strength, and the workload of judges, there has been considerable improvement in these areas, and the judicial system has improved its performance.
Set 5
For most of recorded history, the default condition of information was disappearance. Documents decayed, witnesses died, and what survived did so through effort, expense, and luck. Institutions of memory — libraries, registries, archives — existed to arrest a process that would otherwise run to completion. Their governing assumption was that preservation is difficult and forgetting is free.
That assumption has been reversed within a single lifetime, and the reversal is more consequential than the volume of data it produced. When storage costs approach zero, retention becomes the default, and deletion becomes an act: something that must be decided upon, justified, and carried out against the grain of the system. The archive no longer selects what to keep. It selects, if it selects at all, what to destroy, and every such selection is exposed to the suspicion that attaches to the destruction of records.
The usual anxiety about this concerns privacy, and it is not misplaced, but it is narrower than the situation warrants. Consider instead what forgetting accomplished. A society in which the past dissolves at a predictable rate allows revision of the self: the debtor who becomes solvent, the offender who serves a sentence, the young person whose opinions change. These transitions were never formally granted. They were furnished by the ordinary decay of the record, and the entitlement was invisible because it required no institution to deliver it.
Attempts to reconstruct the entitlement by legal means have run into a difficulty that is structural rather than technical. A right to erasure must be exercised, which means it must be known about, invoked, and administered — and the person best placed to do all three is the one with resources and advisers. What was formerly distributed by the indifference of time is now distributed by capacity to petition. The remedy therefore reproduces, in the domain of memory, the pattern it was introduced to correct: a protection nominally universal and effectively available to those who can afford to claim it.
None of this argues for the deliberate destruction of records, which has an ugly history and worse defenders. The point is that a society which has lost automatic forgetting has lost a mechanism it never designed and must now decide, case by case and in public, questions that were previously settled by decay. It is not obvious that our institutions are equal to this. Deciding what may be forgotten is a heavier responsibility than deciding what to preserve, because the second admits of correction and the first, by its nature, does not.
