Nisha Susan: When efficiency experts put the world in dire straits

In early March, I was in a small room at a large conference with a dozen language nerds. While I was in that room, the grin on my face was the equivalent of someone else’s face while watching the glorious comeback of BTS. Why lie? I find it hard to decide whether I like Nam-Joon or the average language nerd more. This was a comparative literature organisation so everyone present had a thrilling language pair or two up their sleeve. At an earlier session, a PhD student who worked in Arabic and Malayalam and I guffawed at an anecdote that appealed to Malayali refuseniks. In another, I watched one of my favourite translation theorists read out many versions of the opening lines of a Spanish novel—each one translated by a different machine learning app over the last decade, all equally convoluted. Exiting a different session, I made friends with a woman who told me about her father from Uttar Pradesh, her Iraqi boyfriend and her love for an Omani novel that she and I felt was woefully under-read.

That particular morning, I was thoroughly enjoying the talk about a 1970s Russian translation that had been commissioned to mark the millennial celebration of a medieval Persian scholar’s work. The young American who was speaking made a joke that I didn’t understand. But he giggled with the knowledge that he had told a really good one and three of the five people in the world who could understand that joke were probably in that room. As it happened, among the hundreds of people at the conference, most of the scholars of medieval and modern Iranian literature were in that small room when news of the US-Israel-Iran war broke. Not knowing any of them well enough, I watched unhappily, unable to figure out what to say. What is the right way to say: I am so sorry for the stupidity and immense misery that is coming your way.

A couple of weeks later, I found out that a group of translation scholars I hang out with occasionally had their department—religion and classics—dissolved by their university. I thought back to that conference room where at that moment no one had felt the pressure of fake assessments of efficiency and relevance. Tech bros can and have muskily made arguments in favour of cutting out the pursuit of expertise they deem unnecessary—humanities in general and the more seemingly obscure part of it, in particular. Can’t scale up a medieval Persian scholar.

Yet, I say “seemingly obscure” because a few days after the closure of the religion department, I saw a social media post that made me laugh loudly. A woman called Madeline Odent had posted “all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant.” This was, of course, in response to the devolving argument between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo about the war that the US had begun in Iran. Among my freshly annoyed, mostly lapsed Catholic friends, one pointed out that the American administration is extra aggravated by this Pope because he speaks English. When he casually delivers a soundbyte about peace that is transmitted around the world, they can only try to oppress him with tuition in theology and “just wars.” (Imagine trying to justify your war to the Pope with a theory developed by a Church Father who is the Pope’s patron saint—Saint Augustine. I could only think of all those people shouting their garlic-based covid cures at doctors online).

This war shows again and again the consequences of allowing the wealthy with limited education to decide what true expertise is. For instance, CNN reports that mere days before the US launched its operation in Iran, podcaster-turned-FBI director Kash Patel had fired staff from a team whose particular task was keeping an eye on threats from Iran. Though the Americans have made snarky remarks about the Iranians’ English not being good enough to negotiate a ceasefire, clearly their English is good enough to be scoring high in the propaganda war with its very American pop culture coded Lego videos.

Iran’s assessment of the situation was that in April they felt they could suggest a 10-point ceasefire proposal that had different points in the English and Farsi version without the US spotting it right away. And why not, according to a survey by the American Foreign Service Association in December 2025, 98% of 2,100 members of the US diplomatic corps reported a fall in morale since the second Trump regime. Among the thousands of American foreign service officers who have been fired by this American administration were reportedly 13 Arabic speakers and four Farsi speakers, all of whom who could have been helpful in predicting what would come next when the US launched war in Iran. Instead we have heard Trump saying that he was surprised that Iran would retaliate right away on US allies. Instead we had clueless oligarchs and their equally clueless fans around the world (including in India) wondering why this Strait of Hormuz can’t be hopped over or drilled through.

In this sea of injustice and cruelty, another terrible story of a persecuted expert caught my eye. Meenu Batra, 53, is the only licensed Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu translator in Texas. Her services are apparently requested by courts all over the US—a detail that is not unrelated to what has happened to her. Her legal status in the US (after living there for 35 years) was similar to a refugee status but one that could not be converted to citizenship. On 17 March, ICE (immigrations and customs enforcement) took Batra from an airport and imprisoned her despite having all the right papers and most importantly, being no danger to anyone. She reportedly spent the first 24 hours in prison without food or water.

There is a good probability Batra will be sent away to one of the many countries that the US has made deals with to act as super prisons. Even in her missives from inside prison, Batra has had the incredible fortitude to describe the difficult conditions of other prisoners and how she has been trying to help them with the expertise she is grateful to have. In one interview, she said, “Here I am just staring at the wall wondering what exactly I’m doing here but also what is anybody doing here.” A question that I wish many efficiency experts would ask themselves before putting the world in dire straits.

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.