The chapter introduces the idea of using networks inspired by Systemic Functional Grammar to model the relationship between constructions that express a semantic field. The example used in the chapter is Causation. From the work described in chapter 3, 105 verb argument constructions are identified as expressing Causation. A preliminary division is made between causing an action, causing a state, and causing a change in thought or emotion. Finer distinctions within each are then identified, with these distinctions being explained and modelled in taxonomies or Meaning Networks. Finally, the features that contribute to those networks are identified and expressed as independent choice networks, referred to as Systemic Networks.

Chapter 9 examines the three factors that affect radar range measurement: spatial and temporal variations of the dry and wet components of the troposphere, phase advance of radar waves through the ionosphere, and the solid Earth tides. It also discusses practical corrections and mitigation approaches.

The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and the V20 group of finance ministers address climate change impacts on vulnerable countries. This chapter introduces the interconnectedness of climate justice, economic resilience, and sustainable development. It highlights personal stories, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia and Jevanic Henry from Saint Lucia, who share their experiences of climate change’s impacts on their communities — covering both the economic loss and the emotional devastation caused to communities. We introduce the CVF’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor — a unique study of the impacts of climate change, including fresh modelling, covering biophysical, economics and health projections up to 2100. The global community via COP27 and COP28 have agreed on the urgency of both adaptation and mitigation strategies. Yet the speed of change is not sufficient. The fate of today’s most vulnerable will soon be the fate of the world.

Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive presentation of the commonly used range-Doppler algorithm for focusing complex backscatter data into a single-look complex (SLC) image.

The coda draws out the implications of modernist physiognomy for our contemporary moment. As we move from nineteenth-century physiognomy to modernist physiognomy, we encounter more minimalist descriptions of faces – facial sketches, outlines. We encounter faces reduced to a minimalist form. This form is taken up by contemporary facial recognition technologies. Across the scholarly literature on facial recognition technologies, there is a growing awareness of bias: technology is biased because training sets are biased. As Cathy O’Neil writes, “data embeds the dark past.” At the conclusion of this book, the coda frames its contribution to the call issued by Soshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism: “If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so.” This book will have aimed to give historicized substance to a fragment of this past: algorithmic data embeds the long history of the face, including elements of modernist physiognomy.

The chapter explains the process of building Meaning Networks and Systemic Networks, as described in chapter 6, for two semantic fields: Cognition and Communication. The identification of these fields is inspired by the Systemic Function Grammar processes: mental and verbal. The Cognition field is divided into Emotion (53 constructions), Perception (9 constructions) and Thought (92 constructions). Following an overview, the Communication field is divided into communication about a future action (Communication: Action) (21 constructions) and communication about information (Communication: Information) (82 constructions). For each semantic field, the constructions are described as they relate to one another. Their significant features are identified and expressed in Systemic Networks. The distinctions or choices between the constructions are modelled in taxonomies or Meaning Networks.

Soon after the project was announced in 2007, the Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) began putting together plans to acquire land. Unsurprisingly, a number of middle-class and wealthy neighbourhoods refused to move in order to make way for the construction. Two working-class neighbourhoods, densely populated and centrally located, entered the arduous process of negotiating with the BMRCL. As they were in close proximity to the Central Majestic bus station and railway station, the two neighbourhoods – Basaveshwara Nagara and Jai Bhim Nagara – were also well connected to the other parts of the city.5 Unlike illegal settlements that are often evicted brutally, the two neighbourhoods were offered the chance of consultation and options once they had vacated their homes.

Within cities across the world, communal violence has often led to the formation of neighbourhoods segregated on religious lines. Colonies identified by the religion of its residents are now found in Indian metropolises such as Ahmedabad, Mumbai and New Delhi, occupied mainly by the Muslims who were pushed involuntarily to these spaces after decades of sociopolitical marginalisation and targeted communal violence. Due to their identification with the religious identity of its residents, these colonies faced systematic state neglect and lack of infrastructural development pushing them further towards spatial stigmatisation and social segregation (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012; Mahadevia 2002). Given their specific context, these spaces are identified in both academic literature and policy papers as ‘ghettos’, pointing in turn to the many stigmas attached to them. These neighbourhoods are part of a city but ‘insulated’ and ‘do not benefit from the same kind of attention from the state as other parts of the city’ (Jaffrelot and Thomas 2012: 70). Tellingly, they lack state-run schools, colleges, technical institutions, healthcare amenities and other basic facilities like sanitation and water (Jaffrelot and Thomas 2012: 70).

This chapter examines the many exclusions and marginalities faced by residents of one such neighbourhood in New Delhi called Tilak Vihar. The context of this West Delhi space is distinct from other neighbourhoods that are formed as a result of communal violence. Tilak Vihar is a Sikh neighbourhood of nearly 1,000 families headed by the widows of those men who were killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi. It is important to emphasise here that Tilak Vihar is not a self-segregated space. Tilak Vihar was demarcated by the state in order to rehabilitate women who lost their husbands in the 1984 violence and were hence displaced.

In 1974, I travelled as a young graduate student volunteer to join Kishore Bharati (KB), an organisation working for rural education and development in Palia Pipariya village on the eastern tip of Hoshangabad district in Madhya Pradesh. The train made a short halt at Pipariya station, leaving me with only faint memories of yet another nondescript small town. Over the next 20 years, however, Pipariya was to be my nearest market town, and eventually my home. It also became a major centre of KB's educational and social mobilisation activities.

After moving to Delhi in 1992, I continued to visit the town and kept in touch with its people. Over the years, the educational landscape of the town and the aspirations of its young population underwent a striking change. Young students started to enrol in private engineering and management colleges across the country. Graduates from the town gained employment in national and international companies in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, the United States (US), Europe and Canada. I was curious to know what developments had made these changes possible and who had been left behind.

On one such visit to Pipariya in 2018, I met two old friends: a couple who work as schoolteachers and who graduated from the Pipariya Government College (PGC). Hailing from the Other Backward Class (OBC) social category, they were among the last few young science and mathematics graduates recruited as permanent government schoolteachers in the mid-1980s. At their home, the couple introduced me to their two children who had completed secondary education in Pipariya.

In the prevalent modes of reckoning of the Indian middle classes, education has long remained a crucial factor in achieving social mobility and improving social status. During the period of colonial modernity, the appeal of ‘modern’ education had been one of the major factors that pushed many to migrate to the upcoming urban centres in hopes of securing education and accessing the new occupational opportunities presented by an expanding colonial regime. In many cases, such efforts had also helped individuals to shed the dictates of tradition and escape the deep-seated hierarchies of the Indian village. The liberating potential of modern education has since been evident in the ways it has helped individuals and communities to overcome the compulsions of class, caste, language and religion to join the modern workforce and secure employment premised on the tenets of equality and dignity. While the relationship between education and urbanity has remained deeply and historically intertwined, perceptions around what qualifies as ‘desirable’ education have evolved over the years in keeping with the shifts in the broader sociopolitical trends in the country.

Particularly, in the last three decades or so, neoliberal social and economic policy has made deep inroads into Indian society, once again leaving its mark on its burgeoning urban fabric. Apart from introducing ‘global urban imaginaries’ (Anjaria and McFarlane 2011) around consumption and lifestyle choices, it has also produced new bases of inequality based on digital literacy and global access that have further fragmented an already divided urban landscape. The deep inequalities thus created between the dominant and the marginal social groups are evident in the layered access they have to the city and its amenities. Education, apart from housing and healthcare, figures prominently in this discourse.