| Dear Express Explained reader, President Donald Trump has declared India’s economy to be “dead”. This is the same President who insists on describing media houses that oppose his policies as “failing” irrespective of how they are actually doing, and the leader who keeps announcing that he stopped the India-Pakistan military conflict even though India has pushed back as strongly as it can within the bounds of diplomatic discourse. There are many other examples, both from Trump’s first and second terms in the White House, and American media have listed them meticulously. There is, therefore, no reason to take the President literally, or to fact-check him. However, this is a good occasion to run a routine health-check on the economy, and to flag the areas where it is clearly ailing. Udit Misra looked at key indicators, comparing India with other countries, and presented a report. Udit wrote separately in his ExplainSpeaking column on the key takeaways from the latest update to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, with a focus on India, the US, and the world overall. Do check it out. Tamil Nadu Governor R N Ravi this week articulated a sweeping rejection of the basis on which Indian states are organised, saying the drawing of boundaries on the basis of language had created groups of second-class citizens in the country. This is not a new argument, and there is significant scholarship pointing out the flaws with it. Shyamlal Yadav recalled the debates around the reorganisation of states in the first decade after Independence, and the story of how the political map of today’s India took shape. The earthquake off Kamchatka in Russia’s far east that triggered a tsunami alert in the United States and produced several hours of apprehension and uncertainty had a magnitude of 8.8, which made it among the biggest on record. This rare event was, however, not unexpected – the region around Kamchatka is among the world’s most earthquake-prone. Amitabh Sinha and Alind Chauhan wrote on the seismic characteristics of this belt, and the processes of plate tectonics that underlie its seismicity. Finally, I would like to point you this week towards an interesting explainer on sports injuries. The gunman who killed four people in New York City this week apparently had chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma. Arjun Sengupta recalled the story of its discovery among sportspersons and its gradual recognition by governing bodies in sport. Thank you for reading The Indian Express Explained. There is a large body of explanatory journalism, on a wide range of topics, on our website, and I hope you will check it out soon if you haven’t already. Also, many of our best explainers are now behind a paywall, so I hope you will subscribe. Sincerely, Monojit | 
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