At the United Nations, a technical resolution about how continents appear on maps became an occasion for India and Pakistan to rehearse one of the world's most enduring territorial disputes. India voted in favor of a measure promoting equal-area cartographic projections, then felt compelled to clarify that the vote carried no implications for its sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir — a clarification that itself invited Pakistan's swift rebuttal. In the grammar of geopolitics, even the shape of a continent can carry the weight of a claim.