Mood: How the Lounge team is feeling this week

Rohit ‘the hitman’ Sharma

That Rohit Sharma has talent was never in doubt. He has three double centuries in One Day Internationals and four centuries in T20 internationals, the most by any player. It’s his consistency that’s always been an issue. In the second T20 against the West Indies on 6 November, Sharma played out a maiden over at the top of the order before launching into an all-out attack, scoring an unbeaten 111 off just 61 balls. During the course of the innings, he became the highest run scorer for India in T20Is, and the second highest in the world. It looks like he has found consistency in the shorter formats of the game and his performance has earned him another call to the Test team. Cricket fans will be hoping he maintains this consistency in the 2019 World Cup and can replicate the same in Tests. —PKS

The book of life

Started as an email for seven friends in 2006, Brain Pickings, New York-based writer Maria Popova’s weekly newsletter, has become a digital latibule for thousands of readers, exploring the meaning of life through an understanding of science, art and literature. From Susan Sontag’s diary entries on art to Seneca’s take on anxiety, Brain Pickings offers summaries of complex ideas from the brightest minds in history. Popova is now going from cultural critic to author with Figuring, slated for release in February. The debut will examine “the complexities, varieties, and contradictions of love, and the human search for truth, meaning, and transcendence", the author wrote on her blog. Expect to find historical figures across four centuries in the book, from 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler to nature writer Rachel Carson in the 20th century.—SD

Photo: AFP

The death of a tiger

It isn’t often that the killing of a tiger causes outrage across the country, but Avni was different. A tigress in her prime with two cubs, she was just one of 30% of India’s around 2,500 tigers that roam free, the rest living in tiger reserves. She was inconclusively linked to 13 deaths over two years in Maharashtra, and following a mammoth operation, she was killed last week. No one has found the cubs yet. When any member of a severely endangered species is killed, its consequences ripple out beyond just an isolated death. It points to regulatory apathy and the systematic encroachment of forest lands. And this isn’t isolated. Mint reported in January that 115 tigers had died in 2017 alone. On 4 November, there were reports of a tigress deliberately run over with a tractor by villagers near the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in Uttar Pradesh. Evidently Project Tiger isn’t working. And that’s a cause for national shame. —BB

Photo: Imperial War Museums

In memorial

11 November marks the centenary of the Armistice that brought an end to the brutalities of World War I. More than 1.4 million Indians were recruited by the British empire as combatants and non-combatants in World War I. More than 50,000 were killed. Commemorated as Remembrance Sunday, the occasion is set to see major events countrywide. A remembrance service will be held at the Delhi War Cemetery, which contains the graves of the casualties of the two world wars. In Mumbai, at the Afghan Church, a memorial to the soldiers who died in the First Afghan War, visitors can listen to Sikh pipers and war poetry.

Overseas, a memorial for the Indian Armed Forces will be inaugurated on 10 November in the French village of Villers-Guislain, close to which the Battle of Cambrai took place between the German and British forces. —BF