Everyone is feeling the heat
Heyo!
We are slowly moving towards the 50th issue of DoorDesi. OMFG can you believe it? Well, you probably can but I cannot and neither would my mother if I brought her along on this journey. Since my chilhood, I have never been able to stick to any passion project for this long. None. So how does it feel to be part of history? :P
Speaking of commitment, I have been, for a while, considering starting a $1.50 a month membership tier. Then, after the previous issue, one of you reached out asking for exactly that so they could get it. So I thought, what the hell why not.
So here goes nothing. If you like what I do, if you would like to get my time even partially covered, please consider getting a subscription. It'll cost you $16.5 for the annual subscription, and it will show me that you have confidence in this product.
Those of you who are already subscribed to the $5 per month ($50 annually) tier, the Desi fam tier as I call it, thank you so very much! Your support means the world to me. But if you would rather switch to the Friend tier, please feel free to. I really don't mind as long as I get to keep writing to you on a weekly basis.
Thanks for considering it and thanks for showing up every week.
With love,
Sudeshna
Just the gist
I believe most of us living abroad are acutely aware of the ongoing heatwave in India. Every phone call back home, be it with friends or family covers the unbearable heat. This week, we lost an aquarium full of fish to the heat. The water had gotten too hot. In the aquarium. In an urban home with AC. Yep. That is how hot it is getting indoors in India right now. If our fish in a home with a working AC cannot survive, I do not want to think about what the urban poor are experiencing in concrete buildings with no cooling and no respite at night.
The heat wave is not just a human story, though the human story is worse than any economic chart can capture. It is also an economic emergency, and it is arriving at the worst possible time.
There is a trifecta at work, coming at the Indian economy from all directions. Crude oil is averaging above $100 a barrel because of the Strait of Hormuz crisis, and India imports 85% of its crude. Every $10 increase in oil prices shaves nearly 44 basis points off GDP growth. Fuel prices have already been raised repeatedly. Transport costs are climbing. Freight costs raise food prices. Food prices squeeze household budgets. Household budgets cut discretionary spending. The ripple goes across the entire economy.
On top of this, climate models are pointing toward a severe El Nino developing over the equatorial Pacific, with central Pacific warming potentially exceeding 2 degrees Celsius above normal. The IMD has already forecast rainfall 6% below normal for 2026. Nearly 60% of Indian farmers still depend on monsoon rains. A weak monsoon means low production, means less food, means more expensive food, means... you get it.
Then there is the heat itself as an economic problem independent of what it does to the monsoon. Around 57% of Indian districts, home to three-quarters of the population, are already at high to very high heat risk. Heat reduces labour productivity in construction, agriculture, transport, and delivery. It raises warehousing costs. It surges electricity demand. Prolonged heat stress costs India an estimated $150 billion in lost economic output annually, according to one estimate. India's growth story depends heavily on labour-intensive sectors. Extreme heat directly attacks that engine.
➡️ None of this is happening in isolation. One cannot look at this heat wave without thinking of the many 'clearances' issued by central and state environment ministeries for yet another highway built by clearing dense forest cover. The desctruction of India's natural ecosystem in the name of development. The heat is also the accumulated consequence of decades of choices, and the people paying the highest price are the ones who made the fewest of them.
If you got a dollar every time I mentioned the rupee's downward spiral in this newsletter, you would be rich in India right now. If you got a euro, you would be richer. The rupee crossed 96 to the dollar in May, compared to 85 a year ago.
Here is how it works, simply. When India exports goods, foreign buyers exchange their dollars for rupees to pay Indian suppliers, which increases demand for the rupee. When India imports oil, Indian companies exchange rupees for dollars, which reduces that demand. India has consistently imported more than it has exported, running a merchandise trade deficit for decades. This was always managed through three things: export of software services, remittances from Indians working abroad, and foreign investment flowing in. Two of those three are now under pressure. Geopolitical instability has spooked foreign investors, who have been pulling money out of Indian stocks and bonds and retreating to the safety of their home markets. Less foreign investment means less demand for rupees, which means a weaker rupee.
The weaker rupee does make Indian exports cheaper for foreign buyers, which should theoretically help. A shirt that would have cost an American buyer $15 at 80 rupees to the dollar now costs $12.50 at 96. But a cheaper currency only helps if you have the manufacturing capacity to take advantage of it, and India's manufacturing sector has structural constraints that mean it cannot simply ramp up exports to compensate. Add to that the threat of Trump's tariffs, which could make even cheaper Indian goods too expensive or too complicated for American buyers, and the export boost from rupee depreciation may not materialise the way the textbook says it should.
The RBI has been intervening, selling dollars from its reserves to slow the rupee's fall, and India's forex reserves remain substantial at around $691 billion, enough to cover nearly 11 months of imports. That is a meaningful buffer. But it is not infinite, and every dollar spent defending the rupee is a dollar not available for a future crisis.
➡️ Here is the practical upside for you specifically. If you send remittances to family in India, now is an excellent time to do it. The rupee is low enough that your pounds, euros, or dollars go significantly further than they did a year ago. And remittances are not just personally useful. They are one of the few foreign currency inflows that actually help stabilise India's balance of payments. Sending money home right now is a win-win. Your family gets more rupees per unit of whatever you send, and India gets foreign exchange it badly needs.
Tamil Nadu voted for TVK because they were tired. Tired of the DMK, tired of the AIADMK, tired of the same families, the same deals, the same politics dressed in different colours. Vijay built his entire campaign on being unburdened by that history. He positioned TVK as the ideological antithesis of the BJP. Clean politics. Pure force. A new dawn.
That was 21 days ago.
Four AIADMK legislators who had contested under the BJP-led NDA alliance have now resigned their Assembly seats and joined the TVK fold. The Speaker accepted their resignations with unusual speed, while petitions for their disqualification for voting with the TVK during the floor test were still pending before him. The BJP has a name for this playbook. They call it Operation Lotus, and they pioneered it in Karnataka. It encourages opposition legislators to resign and rejoin through by-elections, circumventing the anti-defection law while achieving the same result.
The irony is almost too cinematic. The party that ran on being the BJP's ideological opposite has adopted, within three weeks of coming to power, the BJP's most notorious political tactic. Horse trading is horse trading regardless of who holds the reins.
➡️ This is the question I keep coming back to as an Indian voter: is this our fate? You vote for the fresh face precisely because you are exhausted by the old guard's cynicism, and within a month, the fresh face is doing the same things. It is telling that one of the Cockroach Janata Party's manifesto points specifically addresses this: legislators who switch parties should be banned from contesting any election for twenty years. It sounds extreme until you watch what is happening in almost every state, and then it sounds like the minimum reasonable response. The people of Tamil Nadu did not vote for AIADMK-NDA legislators. They actively voted against them. The fact that those legislators are now in the ruling coalition, welcomed through a legal loophole, is not a technicality. It is a betrayal of the mandate, and it happened before the ink on anyone's finger had even faded.
🔗 The Supreme Court of Letting Go
The Supreme Court this week upheld the legal validity of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission. If you followed the coverage of the West Bengal elections and the 27 lakh deleted voters, you know what this is about.
The court's position contains a contradiction that cannot be ignored. On one hand, it said that deletion from the voter list "does not amount to a declaration that the individual is not a citizen of India". On the other hand, it directed that those deleted will face "adjudication of their citizenship" before the next elections, with the Election Commission required to refer such cases to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act within four weeks.
So deleting someone from the voter roll is not related to citizenship, but the consequence of that deletion is a citizenship investigation. The burden of proving citizenship now falls on the person who was deleted, not on the state that deleted them.
The petitioners had argued that voters already on electoral rolls were entitled to a presumption of citizenship, citing a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that an entry in the electoral roll carries a presumption of regularity. The court acknowledged this precedent but distinguished it, holding that the presumption is "evidentiary and rebuttable," not a "conclusive legal fiction" or a "perpetual guarantee against scrutiny." In other words, being on the voter roll for years does not protect you from having your citizenship questioned if the Election Commission decides to scrutinise your eligibility.
The court also acknowledged that the SIR process "raised legitimate concerns regarding documentation, transparency, and access," but held that its own interventions during the process, including requiring the publication of the full list of excluded electors with reasons, had rendered the process "constitutionally compliant".
➡️ What this ruling does, in practice, is validate a mechanism by which large numbers of people can be removed from electoral rolls and then required to prove their citizenship to get back on them. The court has drawn a legal line between electoral eligibility and citizenship status, but the practical effect of crossing that line is a citizenship investigation conducted by the Ministry of Home Affairs through Foreigners' Tribunals, the same system that has been extensively documented as producing wrongful detentions, particularly in Assam.
🔗 Your data on a trip of its own
If you have ever applied for a Schengen visa from India, you have almost certainly gone through VFS Global. The Zurich and Dubai-headquartered company is the gateway between Indian applicants and 27 European countries, processing over a million applications a year from India alone, a number that has more than doubled since the pandemic.
For the first time, a coordinated investigation across 11 countries, led by Lighthouse Reports and including The Indian Express, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, has examined 150 inspection reports by European authorities covering VFS Global visa centres across 20 EU member states between 2020 and 2025.
The problems the investigation uncovered fall into several categories.
On data security: biometric identifiers were being saved on unencrypted compact discs and transferred between VFS offices and consulates. Biometric data was being sent over open, unencrypted email when transmission errors occurred. Compact discs containing application data older than 18 months were recovered at centres despite a shredder being available on the premises. A 2024 Schengen evaluation of VFS India operations found the company non-compliant with the EU's GDPR, the regulation that governs the security of personal data including tax and financial details.
On passports: Swiss auditors found passports at the VFS New Delhi office that had been sent back in 2020 and never returned to applicants. Three years later. Still there.
On optional fees: multiple inspections flagged that VFS was not making it sufficiently clear to applicants that premium services like lounge access and extended collection hours are optional and have no bearing on visa approval. Given that many applicants are already anxious and unfamiliar with the process, the line between a optional service and one that feels compulsory in context is important to clarify.
On fake appointments and visa shopping: Luxembourg's inspection reports documented a significant increase in fake VFS appointments being sold by travel agents in 2024, alongside fake employment contract letters for work visa applications. High no-show rates in cities like Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, and Jalandhar were linked to visa shopping, where agents file applications through whichever EU country offers the fastest approval regardless of the applicant's actual destination.
VFS Global has rejected the findings and says its operations are "subject to rigorous and continuous government oversight." The European Commission has acknowledged the concerns by noting that growing reliance on external service providers "calls for improved quality control and monitoring".
➡️ This does not mean that your data has certainly been compromised. It just means that it risks being compromised. But this also shows how irresponsible it is of governmental organisations to handover important tasks like visa application handling to private companies. They live by a very different set of rules guided not at all by tax payers' money.
Trending on the internet
🔗 Ranveer Singh thought he is real life dhurandhar
If you are on the internet as much as I am, you have heard at least something about the drama between Farhan Akhtar and Ranveer Singh. Singh walked off from Don 3 a few months ago, weeks before filming was supposed to begin, reportedly because the script still was not finalised and production had been repeatedly delayed. Farhan Akhtar and his production partner Ritesh Sidhwani reportedly sought around Rs 45 crore from Singh for losses incurred. Singh reportedly refused to pay. The Federation of Western India Cine Employees, a 70-year-old trade union representing over five lakh film industry workers from spot boys to directors, then issued what it called a "non-cooperation directive" asking its members not to work with Singh until the matter is resolved.
FWICE cannot technically ban anyone. Its president B N Tiwari described the directive as "more a message than a ban" and compared it to parents scolding a naughty child(!). The last time my parents scolded me I ended up having to spend my life's savings on a wedding so I guess I can see the comparison... Singh allegedly told FWICE the matter did not fall under their jurisdiction and did not respond to their calls, which, given the circumstances, is a bold position to take.
The underlying legal picture is more straightforward than the drama suggests. Film contracts have become significantly more formal in the last five to six years, accelerated by the pandemic and the rise of OTT platforms. A well-drafted contract will have termination clauses specifying exactly what an actor owes if they leave, and without such clauses, default charges can run to five times what the actor would have earned from the project.
➡️ The less glamorous part of this story is what the industry can do to anyone who is not Ranveer Singh. Smaller actors sign hard-lettered contracts that give producers most of the leverage, accept bulk date blocking that costs them other opportunities, and absorb poor payment terms because the alternative is being seen as difficult.
That's all for today, folks! May the God of Chaos stay as far away from us as possible!
