Bahar Dutt

As a child, I spent hours in the mud patch outside my house watching the big black ants that arrived at the start of the monsoon walk in single file to the storm-water drain some distance away. I made tiny homes for them in the mud, decorating them with leaves and stones as I stared at the creatures in rapturous awe. I’m quite sure that I became a champion for green causes not because of any wildlife documentary I watched but because of close and regular interaction with nature in my formative years. Scholars who have researched the subject confirm this belief. In 1980, Thomas Tanner, from the University of Iowa, researched how “significant life experiences” in early childhood that help engage with nature contribute to making environmentally conscious citizens.

This week, two high-profile women who don’t know each other—in fact, one is a critic of the other—discovered they have something in common: casual sexism.

On the back of its Ayodhya movement, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)—from being a party of little consequence (it won only two seats in the 1984 general elections, although its showing might have been somewhat better if Rajiv Gandhi hadn’t been the beneficiary of a massive wave of sympathy following his mother’s assassination)—became the third largest party in Parliament in the elections in 1989 (after the Congress and Janata Dal) winning eighty-five seats.

Narendra Modi has reached out far and wide to get his Clean India campaign off the ground. From industrialist Anil Ambani to former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, the prime minister has called out to prominent Indians—on social media and elsewhere—to galvanize support for the mission, which aims to spruce up India within five years.