It’s tough being Jairam Ramesh. No matter what he says or does, he just can’t seem to break on to the front page. He travelled all the way to Bhopal, stood outside the Union Carbide plant, lifted a fistful of toxic earth and said the first thing that popped into his head, “I have the waste in my hand and I am still alive.” His effigy burnt, he was called ‘ignorant’ of slow-acting poisons and of belittling the sufferings of 25,000 people. The route to the front page was set—he would be called by the High Command, asked to explain his actions, Barkha Dutt would do a show on him, things would be good again. Then the unthinkable happened—the very next day a Junior Minister did a stupid tweet about ‘cattle class’ and walked away with all that he had worked so hard for. Shashi Tharoor got that round, plus, as someone said, he even had better hair. Nevertheless, Ramesh has soldiered on.

Last week, he had the Tamil Nadu Congress calling him ‘ignorant’ for giving permission to the Kerala government for a survey to build a new dam on the Mullaperiyar when the matter was in court. ‘Ignorant’ seems to be fast becoming a tag word for Ramesh. Earlier NGOs had called him ignorant for not backing paper bags and a complete ban on plastic. Ramesh had argued that paper bags would result in the cutting of more trees. NGOs retorted that he was ‘ignorant’ about paper bags being recyclable.

When even that didn’t work, Ramesh decided to put a sock in it again. At the launch of a report ‘Governance for Sustaining Himalayan Ecosystem’ last week, he came up with a sure-shot idea to protect the Himalayas—impose a tax on tourists visiting the hills because, according to him, tourists had the biggest hand in ruining the Himalayan ecosystem by littering it with polythene and garbage. It reaffirmed his ‘ignorance’ of the Indian masses.

The question really is whether denying the poor the one honeymoon spot they can afford will somehow miraculously clean up the hills. Ramesh also plans to increase entry fee into tiger reserves from Rs 90 to Rs 900. The poor can always see them in a movie, he reckons. But do we really not have enough class barriers to erect another one—the ones who can see hills and tigers and the ones who cannot. And this from one of the architects of the Congress’s Aam Aadmi campaign.

If Ramesh is so distraught about the impact of tourists, surely the thought of imposing a quota for the Himalayas must have crossed his mind. Like the sort that exists for Gangotri, where only 150 tourists are allowed a day. Or, he could always float a proposal for a hill passport for everyone in India to keep track of the number of days they spend in the hills. Spend a day extra and you can count on being deported and your passport burnt. Would that be bad for the environment? Depends on whether it’s taxed or not.

Free water. Without branded plastic casings. Bundanoon was the first town in Australia and possibly the world to ban bottled water. It unveiled water stations and drinking fountains where parched people can drink long, deep and freely. This tiny town’s 2,000 residents enacted this ban after a company wanted to extract water in Bundanoon, transport and package it in nearby Sydney, before returning the town’s water bottled and ready for sale at 300 times its original tap-price. Besides lightening the heavy carbon footprint caused by bottles made of crude oil that are used just once and tossed and trucked about in gas guzzling trucks, Bundy-zens now get to drink water without plastic artifice. Just lifted into the mouth and tipped in from folded pink palms. And for those who need to carry water about, Bundy’s got refillable bottles.

It killed our appetite when we heard it. Gourmet, that trend-defining, indeed gold standard of food magazines, is closing. The November issue will be its last. This comes after publisher Conde Nast hired McKinsey & Company to do a three-month study which advised it to cut costs at several magazines. Apart from Gourmet, it is also shutting down Cookie (a parenting magazine), Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. But Gourmet is the shocker, given its near ‘biblical status’ (The New York Times) in the food world. And more so because Conde Nast has decided to continue with its other food title, the recipe-heavy and less cerebral Bon Appetit. With sections like ‘Politics of the Plate’, Gourmet was, for many of us, the window to intelligent and persuasive writing on food. Not to mention, the marvellous food photography. Pray it’s not The New Yorker and Vanity Fair next.

‘@arjanelfassed tweetstreet’, in the Palestinian refugee camp of Askar, has become the world’s first street named after a Twitter account. This is what Arjan El Fassed, a Netherlands-based Dutch-Palestinian writer-activist, had to do to get it: donate $146 to a Dutch website which passed it on to the Palestinian Child Care Society to fund ‘cultural and expressive after-school activities’ for 1,000 children in the camp at its youth centre. Another 199 street names are up for grabs. They may be temporary, the street names, but have brought El Fassed instant Twitter fame. Why did he choose his Twitter account name? To bring online attention to the plight of Palestinian refugee children. The Aksar camp is in Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. Incursions from the Israeli Defence Forces are common in the 60-year-old refugee camp. ‘In a place where streets have no names, one street is named after a Twitter-account,’ El Fassed tweeted.

It’s a call centre alright. Over 100 youngsters man phones round the clock here. But no American twang, the only condition for employment here is fluency in Marathi. Because the employer happens to be the Shiv Sena. A month ago, the party’s executive president Uddhav Thackeray started the call centre inside Sena Bhavan in Dadar. You can get Uddhav’s number, besides details on candidates—and even complain against the Sena.