A Chennai Boy’s Guide to Finding Cosmic Zen in a Soft Idli

To any right-thinking fellow who has ever found himself in the soup, which is to say, any man with a pulse and a bank balance that resembles a vacuum, the name P.G. Wodehouse isn’t just an entry in a library catalogue. It is a lifeline, a cooling breeze, and a very sturdy umbrella in the middle of a life-sized monsoon.

As I stand barefoot on the morn of February 19th, staring down the barrel of my fifty-eighth year, I find myself in a state of “gentle melancholy,” the sort of feeling one gets when the last bit of toast has been buttered and there isn’t a drop of marmalade in the house. It occurred to me, with the force of a wet fish to the cheek, that I owe a debt of gratitude to “Plum” that can never be fully repaid in mere legal tender. One must reach for the pen, or, in this degenerate age, the keyboard and attempt a birthday tribute to the man who made the heat of a power-cut evening in 1970s Chennai entirely bearable.

Growing up as a boy in India, life often felt like a series of unfortunate encounters with the “Aunt Agathas” of the world: formidable ladies in stiff cotton saris who viewed any sign of youthful exuberance as a direct threat to the social fabric of the neighborhood. The world outside was a whirlwind of dust, the relentless hum of a ceiling fan struggling against the humidity, and the distant, rhythmic thwack of a cricket bat. But then, tucked away in a corner of a local lending library on a creaky bookshelf, I found a gateway to a world where the sun always hit the terrace at precisely the right angle for a pre-lunch ginger ale.

Stepping into a Wodehouse novel at fifteen was like sliding into a cool marble room after a long walk in hot sun through Pondy bazaar. There was a specific, sun-drenched magic in the way he manipulated the English language. He didn’t just write sentences. He choreographed them. When he described a character as looking like “a high-powered motor-car which has been somewhat hastily assembled from spare parts,” the grime of the city simply evaporated. In those long, golden afternoons when the summer holidays stretched out like a flat pitch, I could always rely on the inhabitants of the Drones Club to restore my soul.

But here is the rummy thing: as I navigate life as a fifty-eight-year-old man in America, I’ve realized that Wodehouse is actually *more* relevant to me now than he was to that skinny lad in Madras.

At fifteen, I read him to escape the mundane. But at fifty-eight, I read him for the philosophy. I’ve discovered that as one grows older, one doesn’t necessarily grow wiser. One simply grows more aware of how many “Spode” types there are in the world – those pompous bores at reunions and cocktail parties who take themselves with a deadly seriousness that cries out for a well-aimed custard pie.

You know the ones: men who corner you by the dinner buffet near the gulab jamuns to expound on their strictly regimented diets – somber ghastly regimes that involve subsisting almost entirely on thin air, modest levels of direct sunlight and perhaps a single, unseasoned kale leaf. If they aren’t trying to convert you to the lifestyle of a disciplined houseplant, they are droning on about arcane economic theories regarding US deficits and the terrifying fluctuations of the dollar.

There is a profound futility in this modern obsession with living forever through the avoidance of everything that makes life worth living. It puts me in mind of that unfortunate member of the Drones who, in a moment of madness, decided to “clean up his act.” He gave up the old G-and-T, foreswore the morning pipe, and spent his days nibbling on lettuce and drinking luke-warm water in an effort to reach a ripe old age. He was glowing with health, practically vibrating with longevity, right up until the moment he stepped off the curb and was flattened by a Number 11 bus.

The moral is clear: you can dodge the butter, but you can’t always dodge the bus.

Living in the modern bustle of America, the Wodehousean worldview is the only thing keeping my gears greased. To look at a looming crisis and say, ”What Ho!” is not an act of ignorance. It is an act of defiance. It is a refusal to let the “diet Nazis” and the “efficiency experts” grind the spirit down.

I look back at the things that got me through – the moves across oceans, the career , and the occasional “shattering blow” from Fate’s heavy hand – and Wodehouse stands tall on the list. He taught me that even the most dire circumstances can be navigated with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi and insouciance. At fifty-eight, I finally understand that the true wisdom isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about knowing that most things aren’t worth getting into a state about.

The goal of this earthly pilgrimage surely cannot be to live forever by existing on sunlight and thin air. That sounds like a dashed dull way to spend a Tuesday, let alone a decade. The goal is to laugh heartily while you live. To find the humor in the soup, the wit in the woe, and the joy in the jests. Perhaps that, in itself, is the only real recipe to live forever – to be remembered as someone who didn’t just play with a straight bat, but enjoyed the game.

So, as I prepare to blow out fifty-eight candles – a task that, as Bertie might say, requires a lung capacity usually reserved for deep-sea pearl divers – I raise a metaphorical glass. Here’s to the man who gave an Indian schoolboy a window into Mayfair and Tudor mansions, and who gives a middle-aged man in America the strength to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

To Plum, the greatest of them all. It’s been a dashed fine innings so far, and with a Wodehouse on the nightstand, I suspect the next few overs will be just as delightful.

Before I toddle off to find where the cake has been secreted, I must appeal to your better natures. If this little tribute has brought a gleam to your eye or a twitch to your lips, would you be stout fellows and noble ladies and share this newsletter with your friends, family, and even those distant cousins you only speak to when there’s a heated debate over the family’s ancestral estate? Word-of-mouth is the engine of the Drones, after all, and one must keep the torch of civilization flickering.

Furthermore, do pop into the comments below and let me know your thoughts. Whether you wish to offer a birthday greeting or simply recount your own favorite brush with the Master, I shall be waiting with the bated breath of a man watching a high-stakes game of gully cricket.

What Ho! and a very happy birthday to me.

Toodles and pip-pip, my friends!

I read the New York Times so you don’t have to.

I hope your Sunday morning is proceeding with more dignity than the rest of the world’s week. I believe we have officially entered the “Late-Stage Absurdity” phase of human civilization. It is a time when geopolitical strategy is dictated by a man’s choice of neckwear and our diplomatic envoys are predatory rodents.

First, the Jeffrey Epstein “Transparency Event.” For twenty years, this case has been the Loch Ness Monster of the American political landscape. Everyone heard it was out there, but every time a camera got close, the water got suspiciously murky and a lawyer appeared to tell you that looking at it was a violation of a Secret Maritime Treaty.

The sordid saga began in 2005 in Palm Beach, when a 14-year-old girl’s family reported a “massage” that was anything but therapeutic. What followed was two decades of what McKinsey consultants might call “Strategic Incompetence”. There was the 2008 sweetheart deal that let Epstein sleep at his office while serving “jail time,” the 2019 “suicide” in a jail cell where the cameras coincidentally took a nap at the same time as the guards, and finally, the “Epstein Files Transparency Act,” signed this past November.

This week, the Department of Justice finally “complied” with that Act by dumping 3.5 million pages of documents onto the internet. It was billed as the ultimate moment of clarity. Instead, it was a masterclass in aggressive deflection.

Attorney General Pam Bondi spent five hours before the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday explaining why the DOJ managed a truly impressive double-fault. They somehow released the names and sensitive photos of Epstein’s survivors while simultaneously using “broad redactions” to obscure the names of the powerful men who actually visited the island. To put this in perspective, it’s like a police department releasing a list of people who got mugged while blurring out the faces of the muggers to protect their “Privacy Rights.”

When asked about this, Bondi didn’t exactly go for the humble apology. Instead, she informed various Congressmen that they had “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and called one a “washed-up loser lawyer.” It was less of a legal hearing and more of a Real Housewives reunion, but with more subpoenas and fewer table-flips.

The files themselves are a Who’s Who of people you’d avoid at a cocktail party. We have emails from Prince Andrew (now officially Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor) discussing trade reports, and links to everyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Deepak Chopra. Even the UK’s political establishment is shaking. Peter Mandelson was recently ousted as Ambassador after files suggested he sent market-sensitive info to Epstein. When Congressman Ted Lieu asked Bondi if the President himself had ever attended a party with underage girls, she called the question “ridiculous.” Notably, she didn’t say No.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, we are witnessing a different kind of crisis. There is a national paper shortage. I am not making this up. It turns out that BTS, the K-Pop boy band that is globally bigger than even Taylor Swift, is preparing for their massive comeback tour, and the sheer volume of “ARMY” fan mail, posters, and commemorative photo cards has reportedly put a strain on the nation’s timber industry. If you see a Korean official looking stressed near a tree, now you know why.

Moving to the Winter Olympics in Italy, the mascots are stoats named Milo and Tina. A stoat is basically a weasel that has not yet been caught for embezzlement. Only the Italians – the people who gave us the Sistine Chapel, Da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Ferrari – would look at a long-tailed, carnivorous mammal and say, “Ecco! This represents the Olympic spirit of global unity.” Milo was reportedly born without a paw and “learned to use his tail to walk,” which is the kind of heartwarming backstory usually reserved for a Pixar movie about an anxious panda who finds out his destiny is to save the world.

Then we have the Skeleton. While you’re sipping that morning latte, a woman from Cape Town is currently sliding face-first down a mountain of ice at 80mph. For those of us in our 50s, the idea of doing anything face-first is terrifying. If I get out of bed too quickly, I require a 45-minute session with my chiropractor. To do it on a frozen cookie sheet “for fun” suggests a level of mental fortitude that most of us traded for a decent glass of Cabernet and a supportive mattress years ago.

Finally, in the “Are We Sure We Aren’t Living in a Simulation?” category, a reporter recently demanded to know why President Zelenskyy of Ukraine isn’t wearing a suit in the war zone. Apparently, we are on the brink of a global war, but we cannot possibly save democracy if the leader isn’t wearing a pleated slack. It’s the ultimate boomer grievance: “I know your city is being shelled, Vlad, but have you considered a nice navy blazer? First impressions are everything.”

To the men reading this: I hope you didn’t forget Valentine’s Day yesterday. It comes unfailingly every year on the same day. You can’t escape it. Don’t even try. Embrace it.

—

We’re currently a curated group of 73 intellectually well-manicured subscribers to this newsletter. It’s a number so intimately small that suggests I’m either incredibly elite and exclusive or just terrible at marketing. This, in spite of the fact that nine out of ten dentists, and at least three moderately confused political consultants, recommend reading the What Ho! Report to maintain optimal cognitive health.

Just so you know, I personally endure the pain of reading the New York Times every morning specifically so you don’t have to. Think of me as your voluntary designated driver through the pile-up of global news. If you enjoyed this, do me a favor and forward it to a friend or family member with good taste.

And for heaven’s sake, say something in the comments. I know most of you are reading this while nodding rhythmically as your spouse reads you a 12-paragraph “urgent” message from the Family WhatsApp Group about why we should all be drinking boiled neem water to align our chakras. You definitely have the time. I’ve done the heavy lifting here. The least you can do is chime in.

Stay smart, stay skeptical, and whatever you do, keep your name off the island manifest.

Have a great week ahead!

THE WHAT HO! SUPER BOWL SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION REPORT

To the average non-American, American football looks less like a sport and more like a high-speed traffic accident involving people dressed as futuristic gladiators. If you are from a nation that plays actual football – which Americans call “soccer” for reasons involving a long-standing national commitment to being confusing – you are used to a game where the players move continuously for 90 minutes.

American football is not that. It is a game of intense, explosive action that lasts for roughly eleven minutes, distributed over a period of four to five hours. The rest of the time is spent on commercials, replays of the eleven minutes, and grown men in headsets looking very concerned about pieces of paper.

The goal of the game is for one team to move a ball that refuses to bounce in a predictable direction to the other end of a 100-yard field. The field is divided into sections marked by white lines. These lines exist primarily so that various men in striped shirts can throw yellow flags at them. A “flag” is the referee’s way of saying, “Stop! We need to discuss a very specific rule that was written by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 involving the way a player used his pinky finger.”

The players are generally divided into two groups: the “Offense,” who are trying to move the ball, and the “Defense,” who are trying to ensure the Offense requires emergency medical attention. The most important person on the field is the guy named “Quarterback.” His job is to shout a series of random numbers and colors – “Blue 42! Hut! Omaha!” – and then either throw the ball to a teammate or hand it to a guy who has trained all week to run headfirst into a wall of 300-pound humans.

Before we get to the Super Bowl, I have to address the team names. In European football, teams have dignified names like “Real Madrid” or “Manchester United.” In America, our teams are named by highly caffeinated seven-year-olds who choose from a list of “Things That Are Scary or Cool.”

This is why we have the Bears, the Lions, and the Tigers (hold on, the Tigers are a baseball team). In football, we have Bengals, which are just fancy Tigers. If a city couldn’t find a scary animal, they opted for a profession. The Packers are named after people who put meat into boxes. The Steelers are presumably named after people who make steel. The Cowboys are named for, well, Cowboys. Then you have the Cleveland Browns, named after a guy named Paul Brown. As it turns out, naming a multi-billion dollar franchise after a color-surname combo is considered the height of creativity in Ohio.

Let’s talk about the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is to American football what the moon landing was to aviation, except with more salsa dip. It is a sacred secular holiday where Americans are legally permitted to consume their body weight in chicken wings, pizzas and seven-layer dips.

Yesterday, we had the Super Bowl LX in Levi’s Stadium in the SF Bay Area (Woohoo, my home town). The Super Bowl, by the way, is the only event in America that uses Roman numerals. If you tuned in expecting a spectacular display of superhuman athletic prowess, you were likely disappointed. The highlight of Super Bowl LX was three hours of commercials for Artificial Intelligence, interrupted by a Puerto Rican wedding.

The game featured the Seattle Seahawks (a bird that doesn’t actually exist in biology textbooks) and the New England Patriots (people who enjoy throwing boxes of tea off ships). Trump, whose idea of athletic activity is to reach across the couch for his cellphone, was asked to predict the winner. He picked the Patriots and explained with his characteristically refreshing candor that has warmed the cockles of many an American’s heart, “They didn’t vote for me in Seattle.”

The Seahawks won 29-13, mainly because their defense, ominously nicknamed The Dark Side, spent the entire evening treating the Patriots’ quarterback like a senior citizen trying to navigate a revolving door while carrying six bags of groceries. Seattle’s Kenneth Walker III ran through so many people that they were forced to name him the Most Valuable Player.

A 30-second Super Bowl ad now costs roughly the GDP of a small island nation. So, companies are forced to be creative, which is just another word for drugs-fueled. For example, the Comcast commercial reimagined a version of Jurassic Park in which the dinosaurs are tamed using a high-speed router. The standout commercial was by Dunkin’, which btw has stopped appending Donuts to its name. In a masterpiece titled “Good Will Dunkin’,” Ben Affleck reimagines his Oscar-winning film as a 1995 sitcom. He plays a math genius who solves complex equations using donut holes, while half the cast of Friends and Seinfeld stood around looking confused. It culminated in Jennifer Aniston introducing her new boyfriend, Tom Brady, wearing a shaggy wig and asking, “How do you like these nuts?” It was the most Boston thing to happen since the Tea Party, only with more glaze. I don’t think anyone knew what was going on.

Then there was the Halftime Show, starring Bad Bunny. It may be the first time the headliner spoke more Spanish than the average American understands (which is not much), but nobody cared because Lady Gaga showed up to sing a mariachi version of a pop song. The stage featured a literal wedding, a nail salon, and a domino game. It was less of a concert and more of a very loud, very expensive family reunion that 100 million people crashed. It was great!

At the end of the game, we crowned the Seahawks the “World Champions,” causing sporadic fireworks to break out in Seattle suburbs. It is technically true that the Super Bowl champs are also “World Champions” because I can’t imagine any other country being crazy enough to play this specific version of rugby.

If you happen to be in a predicament where you are forced to watch this with Americans, the most important thing to do is look at the screen during a replay and say, “He really stayed low on that block,” no matter what is happening. Everyone will nod solemnly and hand you the guacamole dip. By the time the confetti falls, you’ll be too full and comatose to remember the score, but you’ll definitely feel more American.

Congratulations to the Seahawks and my friends in Seattle. Enjoy the feeling!

A Brief History of the IIT Joint Entrance Examination

In the beginning, God created the Earth, and shortly thereafter, He created the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). He did this so Indian parents would have a legitimate reason to stop speaking to their children for at least four years.

I’ve been looking into the IIT Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) lately, and I’ve discovered that it has changed slightly since I wrote it in 1985. By “slightly,” I mean in the same way that a light jog through Nageswara park in Mylapore has changed into being chased by a pack of caffeinated dire wolves through the jungle while trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube with one hand tied behind your back.

My own journey toward the “Temple of Technology” began in the summer of 1983 at, of all places, the Alliance Française in Chennai. I was enrolled in a French class, a setting that, in any normal universe, should have been the backdrop for a classic romcom.

The class was a vibrant tableau of 1980s Chennai youth. Notably, it was full of pretty damsels. They wore short skirts, smelled of expensive talcum powder, and possessed the kind of effortless charm that could make a young man forget his own middle name. Any sane chap would have seized the opportunity to perfect his French accent to impress the girl in the third row.

But I was not a sane person. I was on a mission, and that mission was named “Venkatachallam.”

Venky was an actual, living IIT student. He was in my French class. In the social hierarchy of 1983 Chennai, an IITian was somewhere between a major God from the Hindu Trinity and the guy who knew the secret recipe for Ambika Appalam Depot’s sambar podi.

I followed Venky around like a confused puppy. I wanted to learn French but I mostly wanted to be like Venky. I figured if I could get into IIT, I too would possess that superhuman glow he exuded. I spent my afternoons absorbing his wisdom, and ignoring the pretty damsels in short skirts in our French class who were definitely wondering why I was obsessed with a guy who spent his weekends calculating the friction coefficient of his own sandals.

Today, I deeply regret this. While Venky was explaining the beauty of an Irodov physics book, those damsels spoke the language of love. Instead, I chose the “Language of the Pulley,” and I don’t think the universe has ever forgiven me for it. I’ve also realized that Venky didn’t have his priorities straight either. He too spent his time on a rando kid instead of pretty girls. That should have been a major red flag right there, in hindsight.

Once the Venky-induced fever took hold of my brain, I realized I had a problem the size of a portly, middle-aged TamBrahm professor from Vivekananda College named Sankaran.

Sankaran ran an IIT coaching center. He was a man of strict, almost aristocratic academic principles. When I asked if I could join his coaching class, he didn’t ask about my dreams for the future. Instead, he looked at my records and saw the mark of the beast: “State Board.”

Back then, there was a Great Schism in Indian education. On one side was the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), an elite breeding ground for future rocket scientists. On the other side was the Tamil Nadu State Board, which Sankaran essentially viewed as a place where people went to learn how to count using their toes.

Sankaran bluntly refused to admit me. To him, coaching a State Board student for the IIT-JEE was like teaching a goldfish to play the electric guitar – a waste of time and frankly insulting to the guitar. I was cast out into the wilderness.

Rejected by the guru and having ignored every pretty girl in a short skirt in Chennai, I was left to my own devices and only one other option: “Agarwal Classes.”

Agarwal Classes was a “correspondence course,” a fancy way of saying – if you sent money to Bombay, the postman would deliver a stack of thin, yellowish booklets that looked like they had been printed on a machine from the Victorian era. These booklets were the holy grail. While my friends were out at the movies or the beach, I sat in a room with a tubelight and a single oscillating fan, ignoring pretty girls in short skirts, obsessing over “Problem Set 4,” trying to figure out why a sphere was rolling up a hill without slipping.

My “test prep” as a State Board rebel consisted of:

1. The Agarwal Booklets: Smelling faintly of ink and Sangam era dust.

2. One (1) HB pencil sharpened with a razor blade until it could be used for minor surgery.

3. A profound sense of spite, fueled by the thought that I wasn’t “CBSE enough” for Sankaran

To understand the gap between what it took to get into IIT in 1985 and now, we must now turn to a classic physics problem. Back then, neither the Agarwal guys nor the IIT professors who set the JEE questions cared about “tricks.” They only wanted to know if you could survive a physical encounter with a primate.

The Setup: A massless, inextensible rope passes over a frictionless pulley. On one end hangs a 10kg crate of mangos. On the other end, at exactly the same height, hangs a 10kg monkey named Newton.

Note: Of all these things mentioned above, the only thing that exists in the real world is a crate of mangos, and I’m not sure of even that.

The Inciting Incident: Suddenly, the monkey randomly begins to climb the rope with a constant acceleration of “a” relative to the rope.

The Question: What happens to the mangos?

In 1985, armed only with Agarwal notes, the 1985 student, let’s call him Cash, would use Newton’s Second Law (F=ma). Since the rope is one continuous piece, the Tension (T) is the same on both sides. When the monkey pulls down to move up, he increases the tension. This tension pulls the mangos up.

The Solution: The mangos move upward at the exact same rate as the monkey. They are eternally linked in a vertical dance of frustration. The monkey thinks the mangos will lower to the ground as he climbs. Alas he never reaches the Banganapallis by climbing. He is essentially like a white collar worker on a vertical corporate treadmill.

It was a perfect metaphor for my life. In 1985, I was the monkey, climbing frantically toward the “IIT Dream,” and the “mangos” (a normal social life, going to the movies with pretty girls in short skirts) were eluding me at the exact same speed.

Fast Forward to 2026.

The world has changed. If Cash’s 1985 method was “Lone Wolf Cowboy Physics,” the 2026 method is “The Industrial Complex.” The postman has been replaced by a 5G connection and Agarwal’s yellow booklets by “Learning Modules” on an iPad. Getting into IIT today begins approximately three weeks after conception. By the time a child is 3 years old, she is sent to Kota, a city that consists entirely of 3-year-olds who have never seen sunlight.

The modern JEE exam is two parts, and the first part is “Objective,” meaning a high-speed multiple-choice marathon. Today’s student – let’s call him Abhinav – doesn’t solve the monkey problem. He doesn’t wonder about the tension in the rope. He has no tension in his shoulders either. He identifies symmetry (both the monkey and the mangos weigh the same). Then he applies a “Super-Fast Trick,” popularized by “Vikas sir” on YouTube. Next he looks the options:

(A) Mangos stay still.

(B) Mangos go down.

(C) Mangos go up.

(D) The monkey becomes a Senior Product Manager at Meta.

Abhinav picks (C) within three seconds and spends the next 57 seconds of the allotted time scrolling Insta reels. Abhinav has the right answer, but has no idea why the monkey is sad.

In 1985, the IITs wanted to see if you could think. They wanted to know if you understood that the universe is a weird place held together by tension and logic. Today, the IITs want to see if you can survive. It’s no longer about whether you can build a bridge. It’s about whether you can stay awake for 72 hours while staring at a diagram of a frictionless wedge.

Today, Cash understands the universe, has met a few damsels since, but is wondering why Sankaran was such a jerk. Abhinav is a billionaire at a tech startup, but has never ever seen monkeys, mangos, pulleys or damsels. Also, I think the State Board kids are just fine. If you can figure out a pulley without Sankaran’s help, you can figure out anything.

I think we should go back to the old ways of solving physics problems. But then again, I also want to go back to the times where phones were attached to walls and no one could call you while you were in the bathroom.

But, if I could, if I just could… go back to 1983, I’d tap that pretty damsel on the shoulder and say, “Excusez-moi, mademoiselle. I am currently ignoring a very smart guy named Venkatachallam to talk to you. Voulez vous prendre some Aavin flavored milk in Adyar and discuss how we are both currently bound by the laws of gravity, but only one of us cares?”

But I didn’t. I stayed a State Board rebel, and solved the Agarwal booklets. And then I grew up only to realize that while physics is constant, youth is a variable that decreases over time.

Have an amazing week ahead!

The tale of two foreheads and .. oh yeah, Chennai’s Ice Age

After years of treating Jerome Powell with the same warmth and tenderness usually reserved for a cold sore, President Trump has finally announced who will be the next Supreme Overlord of the American Dollar.

For those of you who have lives and don’t follow these things, the Federal Reserve is a mysterious, windowless bunker in Washington where people with high foreheads and low personalities sit around deciding whether you can afford a three-bedroom condo or if you will be living in a refrigerator under a bridge. Their leader is the Chairman, a man who is legally required to speak in a language called “Fedspeak,” which is kinda like English, but specifically designed to prevent any human being from feeling any emotion whatsoever. If a Fed Chairman tried to tell you your house was on fire, he’d say, “We are monitoring a localized thermal event that may exert upward pressure on the vacancy rate.”

Through his second term, Trump’s relationship with Powell has been roughly equivalent to the relationship between a lawnmower and a particularly stubborn tree stump. He has spent most of his time using Truth Social to suggest that Powell is a “moron” who was likely raised by slow-moving turtles. The tension reached a peak recently when the Department of Justice – which is now apparently in the architecture criticism business – began investigating Powell over the cost of renovating the Fed’s headquarters. Trump’s theory is that the building cost $2.5 billion instead of $1.9 billion because Powell is incompetent, whereas Powell’s theory is that Trump is trying to subpoena him into a nervous breakdown so he’ll finally lower interest rates to approximately minus-four percent.

But last week, the suspense finally ended. Trump officially announced his pick for the next Chairman: Kevin Warsh.

In his announcement, Trump noted that Warsh is “from Central Casting,” which is Trump-speak for “he looks like a guy who would play a billionaire in a movie where the billionaire is actually a secret CIA agent.” Warsh has the kind of perfectly sculpted, non-moving hair that suggests he has never once been startled by a sudden gust of wind. He is married to an heiress of the Estée Lauder empire, meaning his life probably smells much better than yours or mine.

The selection process was basically a very expensive version of *The Apprentice*, but instead of winning a year’s supply of Trump wine and steaks, the winner gets to control the US dollar and the global supply of capital. Other finalists included:

Kevin Hassett: A man whose main qualification is his ability to explain “The Laffer Curve” using only cocktail napkins and French fries.

Rick Rieder: A BlackRock executive who probably has more money than some medium-sized countries.

Christopher Waller: A current Fed governor who likely realized halfway through the interview that he’d rather be doing literally anything else.

The funny part is that Warsh has spent his entire career as a “hawk,” which in economic terms means he hates inflation more than most people hate finding a hair in their soup. Trump, on the other hand, is a “dove,” meaning he wants the money printer to go WHRRRRR until the ink runs out. But recently, Warsh has started making “dovish” noises, suggesting he might actually be okay with lower rates. It’s a classic romcom setup: One wants to save the dollar; the other wants to spend it on a giant gold-plated wall. They’ll start out bickering, but by the third act, they’ll be dancing in the rain while the Consumer Price Index explodes.

The markets reacted to the news with their usual calm and rationality, by which I mean gold prices fell 10% and silver tumbled 25%, presumably because investors realized that with Warsh in charge, we might actually go back to using money that isn’t made of shiny rocks.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, things are getting spicy. Senator Thom Tillis has vowed to block the nomination until the investigation into Powell is resolved, because surely we can’t have a new money-manager until we figure out if the old one spent too much on marble flooring. Elizabeth Warren says Warsh is just a “Wall Street loyalist,” which is her way of saying hello to anyone who has ever entered a bank.

Jerome Powell still has a seat on the Board of Governors until 2028. He doesn’t actually have to leave the building. We could be looking at a situation where Powell refuses to vacate his office, forcing Warsh to manage the global economy from a folding chair in the hallway near the vending machine, asking anyone passing by where the “Print Trillions” button is.

We live in exciting times. Or terrifying times. It depends on whether you think the economy should be run by a “moron” or a guy from “Central Casting.”

In other news, CHENNAI IS APPARENTELY GOING THROUGH AN ICE AGE.

In Chennai, the concept of “winter” has always been a mythical state of being, much like a quiet and peaceful Sunday at Luz corner. For a city that usually functions at a baseline temperature of “Pre-heated Oven,” the recent dip to 19°C – or as the rest of the world calls it, “a lovely spring day” – has been treated as a catastrophic climatic event.

The transformation was overnight. Suddenly, the same people who routinely survive 42°C humidity without breaking a sweat were seen shivering in heavy woollen monkey caps and sweaters that smelled of mothballs and 1994. In a city where “extreme weather” usually means the sambar is slightly hotter than usual, a temperature of 20°C at midday has apparently caused a total breakdown of the social fabric.

Social media has become a digital fireplace for the frozen. Twitter was flooded with residents claiming they were officially living in “South Ooty” or “Bengaluru Lite.” One viral post noted that the only thing missing was snow, while others begged the sun to return, repenting for every time they had cursed the Chennai heat. The irony is palpable: the same people who spend nine months a year praying for a breeze are now sealing their windows with tape to keep out the “arctic” 20 km/h winds. Brave souls who take cold showers at 5:00 AM are negotiating with their immersion heaters like they are disarming a bomb. Hot tea and socks sales have skyrocketed.

Let’s hope the mercury quickly climbs back to its rightful place in the high thirties, and Chennaiites return to their fans and ACs. Here’s to tucking away their sweaters for another decade, until the next time Chennai “freezes” at pleasant room temperatures.

Have a great week!