This morning I saw a headline that made me stop scrolling: “Northeast Delhi records 160 mm of rain as rain lashes city; ‘Good’ AQI after nearly 3 years” 160mm of rain. Waterlogging. Traffic chaos. Tree falls. Deaths. And… the cleanest air Delhi has breathed in 3 years.
That’s when it hit me. Some of the worst things in life are quietly producing some of the best outcomes.I went down the rabbit hole.
Here’s what I found.
🩺 Health & Body
• A fever breaking a fever. High temps kill pathogens and supercharge immunity.
• Broken bones healing stronger. The callus is denser than original bone.
• Short stress sharpening you. Cortisol in bursts boosts focus and memory.
• Morning sickness protecting the baby. Linked to lower miscarriage rates.
• A burnt tongue making other food taste incredible.
• Mosquitoes pollinating more than bees. Yes, really.
• Your immune system “practicing” on harmless dirt, building your defenses.
The lesson? We spend so much energy fighting the “bad” moments. But sometimes the worst week of your life is the one rewiring you for the best years ahead.Next time something’s falling apart, pause. The rain might be exactly what your AQI needed.
What happens when a discipline is so interdisciplinary that it vanishes from our imagination?
Last week, I received the latest double issue of The Week. Like millions of readers, I eagerly turned to its annual rankings of India’s best colleges. Engineering. Medicine. Law. Business. Fashion. Hotel Management. Dentistry. Journalism. Architecture. Design. Virtually every discipline seemed represented.
Out of curiosity, I looked for my alma mater.
I graduated from Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, in the late 1970s with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Animal Sciences. It was one of India’s finest agricultural institutions, established during the Green Revolution, and it produced generations of scientists, administrators, entrepreneurs and policy makers who helped shape India’s food security.
But there was no category where my college belonged.
Not because it had fallen in standards.
Because the category itself had disappeared.
That prompted me to pull out my nearly fifty-year-old academic transcript. Reproduced below.
As I read through it, I realized something remarkable – not about the university, but about the education it offered.
My degree was called Agriculture Hons inAnimal Sciences.
Yet the subjects I studied included:
Veterinary Medicine
Animal Physiology
Nutrition
Genetics
Biochemistry
Microbiology
Botany
Crop Production
Plant Breeding
Soil Science
Agricultural Ecology
Water Management
Agricultural Economics
Farm Management
Rural Sociology
Statistics
Mathematics
Physics
Food Science
Dairy Technology
English
Punjabi
Extension Education
Agricultural Engineering
Field Training
Pause for a moment.
Today these subjects belong to different schools, departments and, in many universities, entirely different campuses.
In today’s world, I would probably have needed admissions into five or six different colleges to receive the same intellectual exposure.
Yet, in the 1970s, all of this formed one coherent education.
But who ranks institutions that deliberately teach students to think across biology, medicine, engineering, ecology, economics, statistics and society?
Ironically, the technologies that will define the next fifty years demand exactly the kind of education many agricultural universities quietly provided decades ago.
Artificial Intelligence.
Synthetic Biology.
Precision Agriculture.
Climate Adaptation.
Food Systems.
One Health.
Carbon Markets.
Regenerative Agriculture.
These fields do not respect departmental boundaries.
Neither does reality.
The future belongs to people who can connect disciplines – not merely master one of them.
For decades, agricultural universities have produced graduates comfortable discussing microbes, markets, machinery, meteorology and medicine in the same conversation.
That breadth was never considered glamorous.
Today, it is becoming indispensable.
Maybe the problem is not that agricultural education became irrelevant.
Maybe our definition of relevance became too narrow.
Perhaps it is time for The Week, Hansa Research, NIRF and other ranking bodies to ask a larger question.
Instead of ranking only disciplines, should we also recognise institutions that produce systems thinkers?
Universities where students routinely cross the boundaries of biology, engineering, economics, environment and society.
Institutions preparing graduates for problems that do not arrive neatly labelled.
Because the future will not be built by engineers alone.
Or doctors alone.
Or economists alone.
It will be built by people who understand how all these worlds connect.
Perhaps India’s forgotten agricultural universities have been teaching that lesson for decades.
We simply stopped looking.
What do you think? Have we become so obsessed with specialisation that we’ve overlooked the value of truly interdisciplinary education? I’d love to hear from alumni of agricultural, veterinary, forestry, fisheries, environmental and other multidisciplinary institutions. What did your curriculum prepare you for that conventional rankings fail to recognise?
Indian cities have increasingly become vehicle-centric, often at the expense of pedestrian safety, accessibility, and quality of life. Even in premium urban neighbourhoods such as Indiranagar, pedestrians face multiple risks including damaged footpaths, potholes, poorly lit streets, encroachments, unsafe crossings, wrong-side driving, speeding two-wheelers, delivery riders using footpaths, signal violations, excessive noise, and deteriorating public spaces.
The Safe Streets AI Lab seeks to demonstrate how affordable digital technologies, artificial intelligence, citizen science, and community participation can generate actionable intelligence for improving pedestrian safety and urban livability.
The pilot will create a replicable framework that can subsequently be scaled to other parts of Bengaluru and other Indian cities.
The conversation around AI often focuses on saving lives through cancer detection, drug discovery, or autonomous vehicles. Yet one of the biggest opportunities may be much closer to home: helping ordinary pedestrians survive the daily chaos of urban streets.
Take Bengaluru. Even in relatively affluent areas like Indiranagar, a pedestrian faces a combination of hazards:
Potholes and broken pavements.
Encroached footpaths.
Delivery riders and couriers speeding on wrong sides.
The real challenge is not whether AI can identify potholes, rogue riders, or dangerous junctions. Technically, it already can.
The question is whether cities will use AI to prioritize pedestrians rather than vehicles.
For decades, urban technology has focused on moving more cars faster. The next generation of AI could instead focus on helping the most vulnerable road user—the person on foot.
In a city like Bengaluru, where a pedestrian often feels like an obstacle in the transport system rather than its primary beneficiary, that may be one of AI’s most life-saving applications.
The real question is not whether AI can do this.
The question is whether we are willing to use AI to prioritise pedestrians instead of vehicles.
Perhaps one of the most life-saving applications of AI won’t be in a laboratory or a hospital.
A word for those of us who think “environment” begins and ends with carbon.
You care about the planet. That is admirable. You track carbon budgets, follow COP outcomes, argue for renewables, and push back on greenwashing. Good. Keep doing all of it.
But I need to tell you something uncomfortable.
Climate is not the only one wolf that is knocking at the door of Civilization. There are five others.
And while we stare at the climate wolf, the other five are quietly chewing through the door.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 surveyed over 900 global experts. State-based armed conflict ranked as the number one immediate risk. Misinformation and disinformation ranked number one on the two-year horizon. Climate and extreme weather events came third. The world is facing not a single crisis but a polycrisis. Multiple interconnected threats are amplifying each other.
Read that again. A polycrisis. Not a climate crisis alone.
Let us name all six wolves plainly.
Wolf One. Climate. Yes, it is real and it is urgent. In 2024, six of the nine planetary boundaries for environmental health were crossed, with a seventh in jeopardy. Tipping points are not coming. Many are here. This wolf is already inside the garden gate. But it is not alone.
Wolf Two. Debt. Global government debt exceeded $100 trillion in 2024, with the IMF projecting continued deterioration. When the next debt crisis breaks, and it will, it will defund every green initiative on earth overnight. Climate action costs money. Bankrupt governments do not fund green transitions. These two wolves hunt together.
Wolf Three. War. State-based armed conflict climbed from number eight to number one in the 2025 rankings. Ukraine. Gaza. Sudan. Taiwan tensions. A single blockade of the Strait of Hormuz disrupts global energy supply within days. Wars do not pause for net-zero targets. They burn forests, poison rivers, and release more carbon in weeks than most countries do in years.
Wolf Four. Technology without governance. As most governments opt for lighter-touch regulation and international cooperation falters, AI capabilities and risks continue to grow unchecked. Autonomous weapons. Engineered pathogens. Deepfakes deployed at scale. These are not science fiction. They are 2025 news cycles. A single bioengineered event could collapse societies faster than three decades of rising seas.
Wolf Five. The Truth Crisis. For the second year running, misinformation and disinformation tops the medium-term risk outlook. The severity score increased year-on-year, reflecting growing alarm about the intersection of artificial intelligence and information warfare. A society that cannot agree on what is real cannot act on any crisis. Including climate. This wolf does not just threaten the environment. It paralyses the response to every other threat.
Wolf Six. Water, Food and Demographics. Aquifers are depleting silently beneath our cities and farms. Topsoil is eroding faster than it forms. Pollution is the world’s largest environmental risk factor for premature deaths, with 92% of pollution-related deaths occurring in low and middle-income countries. This is not a future scenario. It is today’s lived reality for billions. Climate change accelerates it. But it exists independently of carbon alone.
Now here is the hard truth about single-issue environmentalism.
When we frame every conversation through only the climate lens, we alienate the farmer in Punjab who is drowning in debt. We lose the factory worker in Gurgaon worried about his job disappearing to AI. We miss the policymaker in Singapore calculating energy security tradeoffs. We speak only to the already converted. And we leave the door wide open for the other five wolves.
As nations increasingly prioritize national interests over collective action, pressing questions emerge about the capacity of the international community to confront shared challenges such as climate change, global health, and economic stability.
Collective action is impossible when people feel their immediate survival is not part of your agenda.
The climate movement needs to grow up strategically. Not abandon its mission. Grow it.
Connect climate to food security and you reach a billion farmers. Connect it to sovereign debt and you reach finance ministries. Connect it to conflict and you reach defence establishments. Connect it to water and you reach every mother on earth. Frame climate as one thread in a larger civilizational fabric and suddenly the conversation reaches everyone, not just those who already agree with you.
The WEF’s own framing says it best. The global risks landscape reveals an increasingly fractured world, where escalating geopolitical, environmental, societal and technological challenges threaten stability and progress simultaneously.
Simultaneously. Not sequentially. Not one at a time.
Six wolves. One door. One civilization.
Wearing a raincoat is smart when it rains. But if your house is also on fire, your neighbors are fighting, your bank account is empty, and someone just hacked your security system, a raincoat is not enough.
We need people who can see all six wolves at once.
We need thinkers, activists, investors, farmers, engineers, and diplomats who stop asking “is this a climate issue?” and start asking “how do all these risks connect, and where do I stand in that web?”
Because the wolves do not fight each other.
They hunt in a pack.
Which wolf haunts you the most—the one that keeps you awake at night? Share your thoughts in the comments.
