Mishik Sharma

As the monsoon enters its last month, I have, over the past several weeks, watched the season do what it always does here: gather itself over the ridges, break, and run downhill. Rainwater moves fast through slopes — down the nalas into the streams, and eventually into the Ganga, carrying with it a fine suspension of the very soil it just fell on. It is easy, watching this, to think of it only as loss: topsoil that will not return to the field it came from, fertility quietly leaving the hills for the plains.  But the water does not destroy what it carries. It relocates it. Somewhere downstream — in a riverbed, a reservoir, a delta — that same soil settles, waits, and accumulates. What leaves a hillside field as erosion arrives somewhere else as silt . This is not a new observation. It is, in fact, close to the founding insight of the Gangetic plain itself, whose fertility was built by exactly this process over centuries. What is new — or ought to be new — is the policy attention si...

A few weeks ago, while reading about the history of international finance, I noticed something that seemed almost too obvious to be interesting: many of the world's great financial centres grew out of places where people traded. London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai have very different histories, but there is a broad pattern. They were ports, entrepôts or commercial crossroads before they became major financial centres. Ships brought goods; merchants followed them; information, credit, insurance, foreign exchange and investment followed the merchants. Over time, commercial and financial institutions accumulated in the same places. That prompted a slightly mischievous question when I thought about India's GIFT City. Why is India attempting to build an international financial centre in Gandhinagar, an inland planned city with no historic port? But perhaps that question belongs to an older geography of capitalism. The more interesting question may be whether, in the tw...