[From Unsplash]
Good morning,
As people grow into adults, the idea of engaging with physical exercise appears painful and most people shy away from it. There is much else to be done. There is a counter-intuitive argument Damon Young presents in How to Think About Exercise that we absolutely love.
“The sacrifices of exercise are often more satisfying, because its rules are clearer and simpler than those of workaday existence. Society has laws and competition, but these are often subtle or complicated. For all our intuitive knowledge of class and status, suggested by accent, clothes and musical tastes—what Bourdieu calls a ‘feel for the game’—we can still find relationships uncertain and unnerving. For example, high school was, for me, a continual (failed) endeavour to comprehend. How to relate to others—honesty versus tactful lies, sexual innuendo versus false purity, physical aggression versus symbolic manipulation—was puzzling. Life was (and continues to be) a condition of ambiguity.
“But on the tennis court none of this mattered. I knew that 40 followed 30, and that a left foot over the line when serving was a foot fault. In soccer, there was no question of what subjects to pick, and what profession I was to take up: my job was to stop strikers from the other team kicking the ball past me. Even the most extreme physical endeavours can be simpler than ‘real life’. ‘As daunting as it would be to run for twenty to thirty hours straight,’ wrote Dean Karnazes in Ultramarathon Man, ‘at least I knew what was expected of me. There would be a starting line, and 100 miles from that a finish line. All I needed to do was run from here to there.’
“Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, noted how painful human existence can be: how we are always a question for ourselves. Because we are free, we are fundamentally ambiguous. We cannot shake liberty. There is never a moment, in life, when we can say: now I am perfect (just ‘being’, in Sartre’s words). But sport and exercise give us a chance to be something specific for a short time; to grasp and possess ourselves like a thing; to say, ‘I am this now’. ‘The first principle of play is man himself,’ writes Sartre. ‘His goal, which he aims at through sports … or games, is to attain himself as a certain being’.”
So, what stops you today from engaging in a sport? At least for a brief while?
Have a good day!
The fungi cleaning Delhi’s air
“Twenty-one of the world's 30 cities with the worst levels of air pollution are in India, according to data compiled in the 2021 World Air Quality Report. Six Indian cities are in the top 10. New Delhi has the highest exposure to toxic air in the country. People in India had the fifth highest annual recordings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a particularly harmful form of air pollution. “The year-round average for PM2.5 pollution in New Delhi was the worst of any capital city in the world by a large margin,” a report on BBC reads. While this isn’t new, the numbers looked alarming enough. And what got our attention is that ingenious solutions on how to tackle it on a war footing are being implemented.
One of them is a solution for crop stubble burning—researchers at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi have used a cocktail of seven naturally occurring fungi in the soil to make an organic microbial spray called the Pusa decomposer.
Work on this started a few years ago and after field trials, inputs on what works and what doesn’t, Ashok Kumar Singh, director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, tells the BBC that “The Pusa decomposer is now available in powder form; 300g of the formula is enough to spray on roughly half a hectare of land. Adapting the process has ensured that machines, made freely available to farmers, spray the fields in a more uniform way. The decomposed stubble enriches the soil, reducing dependence on chemical fertilisers by as much as 25%.” He explains that this is because “When farmers burn the crop residue, the temperature of the top layer of soil rises to 42C and ends up killing all the beneficial microbes in the soil. The microbial spray, however, enriches the soil.”
The report has it that feedback is good, the results are there for all to see, and in the longer term, it will go a long way to reduce pollution in Indian cities.
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Most BRICs fall
In November 2001, the economist Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC to describe the combined economic force that Brazil, Russia, India and China will unleash on the world by 2020. A little over two decades down the line, what does he think about BRICs? This is a question the German magazine Spiegel International asked him against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It was a nice dream,” he said.
Reading his answer broke our hearts. Just how did things get here?
“It’s comical that people really thought that I would make forecasts for the next 50 years—and that I would be right. That’s ridiculous! It actually was the art of the possible. I wanted to show that four countries that had been economically subordinate in the course of the 20th century could become influential in the 21st century and even overtake the large economies. Their enormous growth was real and impressive. From a certain point onwards, they used their potential for further development very differently,” O’Neill goes on to explain.
Speaking about Russia, he recalls, “I remember an invitation to speak at the St. Petersburg Summit in 2008, a kind of Russian World Economic Forum. The expectations of the hosts were not clear to me at first: I was supposed to talk about the stunning growth of the Russian economy and leave no doubt that Russia would be one of the five largest economies in 2020. But I was not prepared to do that; the reality simply did not reflect it. I fired a warning shot right into the heart of the Russian establishment. After my talk, the mood was at rock bottom; we held on to our coffee cups in embarrassment. That day, I realised that Russia was facing huge problems. While Putin's people were confusing my dream with reality, they weren’t ready to do anything about it. They wanted me to serve as a kind of key witness for a story that was ultimately insubstantial.”
The full interview with O’Neill is sobering and one that we would urge everyone to read closely.
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How time flies
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
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