India, Jan. 26 -- Dear Reader,

"I use AI all the time now. I find it incredibly helpful; it answers letters so well," says Amitav Ghosh in response to a question. The room laughs, but there's an underlying seriousness. Ghosh's humour is followed by sobering reflections on the LA fires. "It's business as usual for property developers, they will rebuild larger" he says.

Climate and colonial histories have been running themes in the novels and essays of Amitav Ghosh. In The Nutmeg's Curse, Ghosh reveals the raw brutality of colonial greed for spices, and in The Hungry Tide, he exposes the delicate balance between human beings and animals in fragile landscapes and in the Ibis trilogy and Smoke and Ashes he tells the untold stories of the op...