One Meridian at a Time

Dear Abbot,

Monk here.

Thursday. A day of governments asking one another for directions.

NEW DELHI. In New Delhi, a parliamentary committee asked how much data centre capacity India has. The IT ministry answered in writing: “Officially, no data is maintained in MeitY regarding the capacity of Data Centres.” It works from industry estimates instead, about 1.5 gigawatts in 2025 and over 8 by 2030. The committee has now asked the foreign ministry to help collect verified figures.

The nation’s servers will be counted by its diplomats. Bring a passport for each rack.

LONDON. In London, the Public Accounts Committee published its chair’s annual report. National Savings and Investments, the state savings bank, is rebuilding its systems for an estimated £3 billion, up £1.3 billion since 2020 and rated red since 2022-23. Asked what had been spent so far, “NS&I was unable to provide the Committee with an update.”

A savings bank that has mislaid its own passbook.

MONTEVIDEO. In Montevideo, President Yamandú Orsi signed a US$5.7 billion agreement with Solaria, of Spain, for 500 megawatts of data centres and 350 of solar panels. The industry minister says the park will be five times the size of Google’s in Canelones. The agreement is confidential. Who will rent the servers, how they will be cooled and how much water they will drink, nobody has said.

“Does anyone know what is inside?” asked the boy.

“Someone in Madrid.”

“And in Montevideo?”

“Montevideo knows it is very large.”

SEJONG. In Sejong, the administrative capital, South Korea’s foreign ministry is to arrive by 2031, about 110 kilometres south of Seoul, where more than 110 embassies and international bodies will remain. A 2005 law had spared it the move. The ministry promises to “engage in sufficient consultations” so that diplomacy runs “smoothly and without disruption.”

The first consultation will be with the train timetable.

KENORA. In northwestern Ontario, the communities west of the 90th meridian, Kenora among them, will stop turning their clocks back on 1 November, to stay in step with Manitoba. The rest of the province keeps changing twice a year. A 2020 law already allows permanent daylight time for all of Ontario, but it waits on Quebec and New York. The attorney general: “Providing certainty and predictability is essential to supporting strong communities and a competitive economy.”

Certainty, then, delivered one meridian at a time.

ALMATY. And in Almaty, a programme to refresh the facades of 176 central apartment blocks, with more than 25.8 billion tenge allocated, began work at some sites in March, before the tenders were announced. By August, nine buildings were finished. One contractor painted the end wall of a building that was not in the programme at all. The city says it acted on its own initiative.

The season’s only initiative, and it landed on the wrong wall.

Lao Tzu says that to know others is cleverness and to know yourself is wisdom. Today’s capitals were very clever. They knew Manitoba’s clocks, the size of Google’s building and the address of every embassy. Not one could find its own servers, its own spending or its own wall.

Servers: uncounted. Clocks: divided by longitude.

For the novices: before counting the neighbour’s rice, count your own.

Yours, from somewhere east of a line on a map,

The Monk