Global Warming Is Man-Made. One Man!

Somewhere out there right now, a fighter jet is slicing through the sky. A sleek marvel of human engineering — precision-tested, reinforced, optimized. Somewhere deep inside its classified bowels, you’ll find the handiwork of my friend Saji — a quiet, peace-loving man whose soul clearly belongs in a hammock with a pen, not inside a missile casing.

This… is the problem.

You see, the man was never meant to be tampering with afterburners and thrust coefficients. Saji was designed — by the universe, mind you — to sit under a tree, sip filter coffee, and casually write the kind of lines that make you drop your phone and re-evaluate your life. But instead? He’s busy figuring out how to make flying death machines more surgically lethal.

Why, Saji, why? You are in an unnatural place. You’re a painter painting warning signs on a BrahMos missile. It’s like asking Gulzar to draft a DRDO compliance checklist. I mean, sure — it’ll rhyme, but why?

They talk of climate change. They warn of ecological collapse. They call it a man-made crisis — but do they really understand what that means? Because this one is extremely man-made. You take a man of words and plant him in a warmonger’s workplace — and the balance of cosmic harmony tilts, dangerously. Oceans rise, forests burn, and somewhere… a missile sighs in verse.

Look at the man! Saji should be scribbling profound nonsense in a notebook and winning literary awards he might simply refuse to attend. But no — we’ve somehow managed to place him at the crossroads of scary acronyms and reinforced bunkers. And while the country may be safer (thank you, da), the soul of humankind has been left defenseless. Unarmed in the war for beauty.

All I ask — all we ask, really — is that Saji stop guarding his words like they’re HAL’s last surviving printout of the Tejas engine manual, laminated and hidden behind three retired colonels and a coconut-breaking ritual. Let a poem slip through. A short story, even. Scribble on the back of that printout if you must. Just give us something before another rocket is launched in place of the next great bestseller.

Because one day, when the literary world finally catches a glimpse of what we’ve lost to aero engines and defence protocols, there will be a great collective scream into the void: “Wait… he could’ve been writing this all along?!”

And on that day, I will simply sip my tea, raise one smug eyebrow, and whisper: “I tried to warn you.”