Look at an ordinary wooden ferry pulling away from the bank in the falling light.

The crossing is rarely dramatic. A passenger argues over the fare; a vendor balances two empty cane baskets on his knees; a young mother reaches out to pull a toddler back from the wet edge of the boat. Beside them, someone else sits quietly on the damp bench, staring down at the dark seams in the timber.

It is easy to imagine that everyone aboard is nursing an invisible tragedy. In truth, most passengers are simply tired, calculating household expenses, or wondering what is waiting on the stove at home. But in any gathering of strangers, there is often someone who has stepped outside the reach of ordinary conversation.

In the opening chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s collapse does not begin with silence. He speaks at length. He catalogues the physical symptoms of his dread. His trembling limbs, burning skin, and dry throat… and constructs elaborate, reasoned arguments about familial duty, social breakdown, and ritual ruin. He can explain the predicament from every angle, yet his analysis changes nothing. By the opening verses of the second chapter, he confesses that his nature has been overcome by weakness (कार्पण्यदोषोपहतस्वभाव: ... | 2.7) and that his mind is bewildered about duty.

Arjuna’s crisis reveals a difficult truth: suffering does not always stay hidden because words are missing. Often, a person has explained the ache a hundred times, rehearsed the defense, argued the logic until the voice is hoarse, and still finds no way forward. The boundary of language is reached not only by those who cannot speak, but by those who discover that no arrangement of words can make the weight bearable.

How many came to the water’s edge

with things they could not speak or name?

The Crowd of Strangers

A few feet from the engine housing, a man rehearses an apology he knows he will never make. Across the deck, an elderly woman adjusts her cotton shawl, carrying news she has not yet figured out how to tell her daughter.

Between the person talking loudly on a mobile phone and the student reading a textbook, ordinary life continues. Society demands and rewards that visibility. We build institutions around public titles, legal contracts, family obligations, and civil decorum. But we have almost no social room for the experiences that fail to fit those forms: a devotion that had to remain unacknowledged, an irreparable mistake made in private, or the quiet, steady failure of a life’s primary hope.

In the second chapter of the Gita, Lord Krishna speaks to the broader mystery of embodiment: अव्यक्तादीनि भूतानि व्यक्तमध्यानि भारत | 2.28 - beings are unmanifest in their origin, manifest in the intervening period, and unmanifest again after death.

Lord Krishna’s verse is a metaphysical reflection on birth and mortality, not a psychological theory of secrecy. Yet it opens a quiet, metaphorical space: even during this brief middle stretch where human lives are visible, how small a portion of anyone’s existence do we actually witness?

We see the fare being handed over, the wet shoes, the parcel balanced on a lap. What remains submerged is not always concealed out of caution. Sometimes there is simply no place for it in the ordinary transactions of the day. The boat carries them all across. What each person is carrying remains largely unknown to the others.

How many stood among the crowd,

bearing a grief without a claim?

The Wordless Address

Near the prow, a passenger leans over the railing, dips fingers into the cold water, and presses them against their forehead. There is no spoken chant, no Sanskrit verse, no offering of sweetmeats.

In the seventh chapter of the Gita, Lord Krishna identifies four kinds of virtuous seekers who turn toward the divine (चतुर्विधा भजन्ते मां जना: सुकृतिनोऽर्जुन | 7.16): the distressed (आर्त), the seeker of knowledge (जिज्ञासु), the seeker of material gain (अर्थार्थी), and the wise (ज्ञानी).

It is telling that the distressed appear first. Affliction does not wait for a refined vocabulary. Some people find solace in magnificent poetry or intricate philosophy; others find that when a crisis strikes, the mind empties of every formal phrase it ever memorized.

The Gita later offers a companion verse in Chapter 9, where Krishna remarks that whether one offers a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or even a little water (पत्रं पुष्पं फलं तोयं यो मे भक्त्या प्रयच्छति | 9.26), it is received if offered with devotion. The significance does not lie in the material splendor of the ritual, nor in the rhetorical polish of the plea. Perhaps that is what remains when speech runs dry: not a perfected prayer, but the possibility that a small, sincere gesture may still be enough.

Some folded hands without a word,

some had forgotten how to pray.

What the Water Keeps

The engine cuts to an idle as the wooden bow bumps against the mud and stone of the opposite shore.

The Gita uses a famous comparison in its second chapter to describe the disciplined mind: आपूर्यमाणमचलप्रतिष्ठं समुद्रमाप: प्रविशन्ति यद्वत् | 2.70 - just as the waters of all rivers enter an ocean that remains full and undisturbed, so one who is disciplined finds peace amid the influx of desires. The comparison concerns inward equanimity, not emotional indifference or a promise that nature will dissolve our sadness.

The river does not offer a rescue. Stepping off the ferry does not heal an illness, erase a debt, or return the dead. The water is entirely indifferent to the moral worth of the passengers; it provides neither forgiveness for an unspoken crime nor validation for a silent love.

What it offers during the crossing is something much sparser: a brief, neutral interval between two banks. On the chariot of Kurukshetra, Lord Krishna’s teaching did not make the opposing army disappear, nor did it spare Arjuna the pain of battle. The circumstances remained, but Arjuna was asked to understand his duty, his attachments, and the action before him differently.

Some people cross the water hoping to leave a sorrow behind; others step ashore knowing they must pick it up again on the other side. The river receives neither their explanations nor their excuses. It simply bears the vessel through the dark, indifferent and unhurried, while the passengers step back into the street to resume their lives.

The river made no promises,

nor asked what they had come to say.

In the foundational mythology of the subcontinent, the descent of the Ganga is rarely depicted as a simple act of obedience.

When the penance of Bhagiratha summoned the celestial waters to wash clean the ashes of his sixty thousand ancestors… the sons of Sagara. The story remembers that the river did not descend without reservation. In some traditions surrounding her descent and sacred role, the river herself raises a troubling question: who will cleanse her once the world has deposited its transgressions into her waters? It took the matted locks of Lord Shiva to cushion the violence of her fall, slowing an unbridled torrent into navigable currents across the northern plains.

The narrative tells us how the river came to liberate the dead. It also leaves behind an uncomfortable question: what happens when those who seek purification become the source of her defilement?

Our popular retellings often forget the river’s hesitation, celebrating her arrival while passing over the terms of the covenant. The river was invited down not to inhabit an untouched sanctuary, but to function as an open basin for mortal failure. She came to receive what human beings could neither undo nor carry: the burnt soot of unatoned lives, the residue of crime, and the silent weight of grief.

The materials we once entrusted to the river were largely familiar to the cycles of decay: clay, flowers, wood, and ash. The substances we now send downstream include compounds that do not disappear merely because the current carries them away. Whatever the ancient stories imagined of her powers, the physical river has limits.

The Silt and the Steps

At Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi, the evening conversation between the city and the river begins with brass and camphor.

Priests mount raised wooden platforms set along the bank. Multi-tiered brass lamps are lifted in wide, geometric arcs against the darkening water. Conch shells sound across the stone steps, accompanied by the rapid, metallic beat of bells and hand-turned gongs. Small terracotta bowls filled with oil and ringed with flower petals are lowered into the stream, drifting out into the water like floating embers.

It is an elaborate act of devotion, impossible to look away from.

Yet beneath the wooden platforms, the physical reality of the river is unadorned. The sandstone steps have been rebuilt, repaired, submerged by seasonal monsoons, coated in thick silt, and rebuilt again across centuries. The river has no obligation to remember which ruler or merchant paid for them. It treats the oldest bastion and the newest patch of grey masonry with the same slow, abrasive friction.

The river does not keep our names, nor does it register our pageantry. It simply receives whatever falls into it.

Further along the crescent of the bank, at Manikarnika, the nature of that reception changes. There are no brass bells here, only the dry crackle of burning sal wood, the smell of smoke, and the quiet movement of bamboo stretchers carried down through the lanes. A shrouded body is dipped into the water for a final ablution; later, when the pyre has spent its timber, the remaining embers and bone fragments are swept from the stone into the dark current.

For a few moments, a cloud of grey ash turns the water opaque. A wooden oar cuts through the plume, the river turns in its bed, and the sediment disappears downstream into the silt.

A bystander watching from the steps might turn this into an easy meditation on the insignificance of mortal grief. But the grief of the family climbing back up the alley is not light. To the person walking away, the loss is total; to the water moving past Kashi, it is simply matter returning to matter. The river does not console. It does not perform sympathy. It only offers an exit.

The Convenience of the Sacred

The most revealing encounter with the river does not take place at the cremation fires. It happens during the ordinary daylight between ceremonies.

A morning bather stands chest-deep in the water. He cups the brownish fluid in his palms, raises his arms toward the sun, murmurs a prayer, and lets the water spill back into the current in an ancient gesture of reverence.

A short distance away along the same stone bank, an open municipal drain discharges murky, untreated domestic wastewater into the flow. The bather does not look at the outlet. He does not turn his gaze toward the refuse gathering around the hull of a nearby boat, where a plastic bag of decayed offerings has caught against the rotting wood.

The danger begins when we confuse spiritual purity with physical invulnerability. The belief that a river can cleanse the soul does not mean its water can absorb unlimited sewage. Yet it is remarkably easy to preserve the language of reverence while surrendering the work of protection.

Calling the river Ganga Ma does not, by itself, clean her water. The danger lies in treating her sacredness as a guarantee that no human action can diminish her. By declaring her sacred nature indestructible, we grant ourselves a quiet exemption from restraint. If her power to absolve is limitless, then no volume of filth can diminish her; if she is an immortal mother, she is presumed capable of swallowing our neglect indefinitely. Reverence becomes a substitute for sanitation.

There is a familiar human pattern here. We routinely assign the virtues of boundless patience and endurance to that which we intend to exhaust. We praise the selflessness of the soil, the endless reserves of the forest, or the uncomplaining sacrifice demanded of those who manage the burdens of a household… turning their tolerance into a moral duty so we need not examine the weight we place upon them.

We mistake something’s inability to refuse for an invitation to continue demanding.

The Price of Convenience

It is easy to look at the discarded plastic or the wilted garlands along the ghats and place the blame entirely upon the pilgrim. But the degradation of a major river basin is not merely a failure of individual conscience.

The crisis is structural, produced by economic and administrative convenience. It is produced by untreated municipal sewage entering the river through urban drains; by industrial effluents that escape effective treatment; by agricultural runoff carrying fertilisers and pesticides; and by dams and diversions that alter the river’s natural flow. These pressures do not arise from a single source, nor can they be removed by a single ceremonial campaign.

Between municipal bodies that defer maintenance and enterprises that circumvent regulations, the water carries the burden because disposal downstream is cheap. It is far less costly to let the river convey waste toward the sea than it is to build, power, and maintain the infrastructure required to intercept it.

Yet water possesses no mechanism of refusal. A river cannot protest its intake pipes; it cannot stage a walkout or demand a revised agreement. It obeys only fluid mechanics and gravity. What enters its waters may travel downstream, settle into sediment, accumulate in living organisms, or remain long after the current has moved on.

What we see along the river is not an absence of faith, but the consequence of faith stripped of accountability. We have created a culture in which millions can revere a river while the machinery of daily life steadily pollutes it.

What the River Cannot Refuse

At the edge of the ghat, as the bells fall silent and the crowds begin to disperse into the lanes, a woman lowers a small leaf-boat into the water.

The lamp inside it is modest… a wick dipped in oil resting in a small terracotta cup, bordered by a few crushed marigolds. For a moment the flame survives, a trembling point of light holding itself against the dark expanse of the water.

Then the current takes it. It drifts past the wooden platforms, past the moored tourist boats, past the debris trapped against the stone steps, and into the unlit channel beyond the reach of the sodium lights.

Tomorrow the woman may return with another lamp. The steps will be swept, the incense relit, and the family stretchers will arrive at the pyres. Along the length of the bank, the city’s drains will continue their quiet, steady discharge into the water.

The river will continue to receive what we send into it, even as the life within its waters pays the price.

The question is no longer what the Ganga is capable of carrying.

The question is what we are willing to stop placing upon her.

(Author’s Note: The observational vignettes along the riverfront are presented as literary reconstructions - meditations drawn from the familiar rhythms and ritual landscape of Varanasi rather than documented reportage.)

We are taught to measure human existence by the intensity of its personal luminescence.

From childhood, the cultural ideal whispered into our ears is one of solitary brilliance: the blazing prodigy, the towering historical figure, the monumental career, the life that burns so brightly it scorches its name into the public record. We celebrate those who command rooms, those who gather crowds, and those whose achievements outshine the ordinary landscape around them. In this framework, life is conceived as an endurance race of self-display. The unspoken ambition is to become a star. An isolated, self-generating furnace of light whose primary virtue is its capacity to be seen from a distance.

Yet the star is an incomplete metaphor for human living.

In nature, a star is not an act of vanity; it provides the gravitational anchor and physical warmth that makes biology possible. In human culture, however, the ideal of the solitary star is routinely conflated with something far narrower: the spotlight. A spotlight singles out a figure for attention. A lantern illuminates the space through which others must pass.One asks us to look towards its subject; the other helps us see what lies ahead.

To define life entirely by the height of one’s platform or the reach of one’s visibility is to confuse the performer with the illumination. Personal ambition is not inherently hollow, nor is historical achievement evidence of vanity; a scientific discovery, an enduring book, or an engineered vaccine can cast light across generations. The error lies in mistaking the spotlight for the purpose of light itself. What if the worth of our brilliance lies not in how brightly it makes us visible, but in what it allows others to see?

What if the primary beauty of being alive has less to do with the duration of our personal display, and far more to do with what that light makes bearable for someone else?

An Ordinary Room at 3 AM

To understand the difference between the spotlight and the lantern, one must leave the auditorium and step into an ordinary room at three o’clock in the morning.

Darkness in human life is rarely an abstract poetic trope. It possesses physical weight, texture, and silence.

It is the hollow, ringing quiet that fills a house in the weeks following a bereavement, when the condolences have ceased,the relatives have boarded their return trains, and the survivor sits alone with the impossible silence of an unmade bed. It is the sterile, humming corridor of an oncology ward where a family waits for the results of a biopsy, watching the fluorescent tubes flicker against pale linoleum. It is the sudden, cold reckoning of an economic catastrophe, or the internal collapse of someone who looks at their own life and finds no reason to pull back the blankets at dawn.

When a human being is trapped inside that kind of dark, abstract achievements and distant brilliance reveal their limits.

This is not because philosophy, science, or art are useless. Medical research discovers the therapies that save lives; structural economic reforms alleviate systemic miseries; literature gives voice to isolations that previously had no name. But in the immediate, suffocating centre of a crisis, an abstract achievement cannot substitute for human presence. A brilliant treatise on the evolutionary necessity of grief does not dry a single tear. The applause filling a distant auditorium cannot reach the person shivering on the floor.

Worse still is the modern reflex to offer forced optimism - the insistence that darkness is merely an attitude problem, that grief can be reframed into personal growth, that pain is simply an experience waiting to be optimised. This counterfeit luminescence does not heal; it wounds. It demands that the suffering person perform gratitude while their chest is still crushed under an unbearable stone.

Suffering, to be sure, is not a uniform or static monolith. Much of what human beings endure - preventable disease, crushing poverty; the structural indignities of neglected public systems, is not an inevitable law of the universe. It is the consequence of human failure, and we have a moral responsibility to dismantle the structures that produce it.

Yet even in an entirely just society, finitude remains. Bodies age, accidents happen, hearts break, and mortality arrives.You cannot organise or argue away the fundamental vulnerability of conscious life.

The question is never whether the night will arrive. The question is what we do when someone must walk through it.

The Canopy of Filaments

In an ordinary festive street at night, there is a visual image that untangles the vanity of the solitary spotlight.

Suspended across the alley is a temporary ceiling of fairy lights. It is not an imposing, high-wattage industrial floodlight designed to turn midnight into midday. Look closely at the construction: it is made of hundreds of small, fragile filaments strung together along black, flexible wire, sagging gently under their own modest weight against the pitch-black sky.

In isolation, a single bulb on that wire illuminates almost nothing. Its glass is paper-thin; its connecting wire is barely thicker than a thread; its pale glow reaches scarcely a few inches before dissolving into the gloom.

Yet strung together, the relationship between those filaments changes what is possible.

A canopy depends entirely on connection. Each small light belongs to a larger arrangement. None illuminates the entire street, but together they make the passage possible.

They do not conquer the night. The sky above them remains as vast, cold, and impenetrable as it was before the switch was thrown. But beneath that canopy, the street is transformed. The uneven stones, the mud puddles, the broken steps, and the stray hazards of the path are suddenly visible. A mother holding a child’s hand can step forward without stumbling. An old man with a walking stick can find his balance. Strangers walk together under a warm, amber shelter, talking in low voices, shielded from the crushing infinity of the dark sky above.

This is the physics of genuine shelter.

Human goodness is rarely an isolated, monumental virtue enacted by a single heroic figure; it is something we construct collectively. A canopy of small lights does not exist to call attention to itself; it exists to make the road passable for travellers. It suggests that a meaningful life is not built by generating blinding personal brilliance, but by adding one steady, reliable filament to the shared wire, contributing just enough quiet warmth so that the person walking beside you does not have to navigate the rough stones in absolute blindness.

Making Bearable

Notice the exact, unpretentious discipline of the word: bearable.

To make darkness bearable is not to claim that we can banish it. It does not promise that we possess the divine power to cure the human condition, eliminate grief, or construct an existence where sorrow is impossible. To make such claims is to indulge in sentimental arrogance.

To make darkness bearable is a far humbler, and far braver, ambition.

It is an admission of our finite limits. It recognises that when a friend’s parent dies, no sentence we utter will resurrect the dead or dissolve the grief. But to sit on their floor for four hours without checking a phone, to boil water for tea when their kitchen has gone cold, to listen to the same broken sentence repeated ten times without offering a shallow platitude - that does not fix the tragedy, but it prevents the tragedy from turning into solitary exile. It takes an agony that was too heavy for one pair of shoulders and distributes the weight across two.

Consider the quiet acts that keep human civilisation from collapsing under the weight of its own fragility:

• The hospice nurse who adjusts a thin cotton sheet over the trembling feet of an elderly patient who will not survive the night, speaking in a low, gentle voice even when the patient can no longer answer.
  

• The colleague who steps forward to take on the operational load of a grieving co-worker, ensuring the work is done without demanding public recognition for the intervention.
  

• The neighbour who notices an elderly woman struggling to carry groceries up rain-slicked steps and takes the handle without making a speech about charity.
  

• The person who swallows their own rising irritation during an argument, choosing patience over a cutting, clever retort, simply because they recognise that the other person is fighting a private panic they cannot name.
  

None of these actions attracts a spotlight. They do not trend on social networks. They are not recorded on bronze plaques or cited in biographies. They are performed in the quiet, dusty corners of life where nobody is taking photographs.

Yet they represent an essential ethical achievement: the decision to share the weight of another person’s suffering without surrendering the dignity of one’s own life.

None of this means that a human life must earn its worth through usefulness. A person confined to a hospital bed, unable to lift a hand for anyone else, is no less deserving of love than the nurse who tends to them. The lantern is not a measure of who deserves to exist; it is a metaphor for what we can choose to give when we have something to give.

It is not an invitation to become a silent martyr or an emotional dumping ground for someone else’s unresolved cruelty. There is a profound difference between freely chosen care and coerced self-destruction. A lantern is not the sun. It was never meant to illuminate every road, nor to burn itself to destruction attempting to do so.

Its fuel is finite. A person who exhausts their own reservoir in an attempt to abolish the world’s night ends up cracked, empty, and cold. The wisdom of the lantern lies in offering what light it can to the space directly before it, without pretending its supply is boundless or its boundaries unnecessary.

Where the Light Falls

A beam of light crossing an empty void may remain invisible to anyone looking across its path. It becomes visible when it encounters matter - when it scatters across dust motes, catches the rough bark of a roadside tree, or illuminates the contours of a human face.

There is something similar in the ethical life.

We do not live merely to burn for our own gratification. The measure of a life was never how long we managed to keep our own flame flickering, nor how high our sparks flew into the night before dying out. To spend a lifetime obsessing over one’s own luminescence is to end up like a mirror locked inside an empty cabinet - capable of reflection, yet entirely blind and sterile in the dark.

The real grace of existence is found where the light falls: in how much of our finite, fragile vitality was spent softening the impact of an indifferent world upon the people who shared our road.

We will not outlast the night. The expanse that surrounds our brief, fragile lives is ancient, immense, and ultimately indifferent to our arrival. Our bodies will fail, our work will be revised or forgotten, and our names will eventually slip beneath the surface of memory.

Yet while the breath is still in our lungs, we hold a quiet, sovereign choice. We can spend our days demanding that the world turn its spotlights upon us, or we can choose to be the lantern. We can choose to be that modest, connected filament on the wire that hums against the cold… illuminating just enough of the mud, the stones, and the threshold so that someone else can find their footing, take another breath, and keep walking through the dark.

The Woman and the River

The old woman had been sitting on the stone steps of Dashashwamedh Ghat for nearly an hour.

Around her, Varanasi was assembling its nightly conversation with the divine. Young priests in gold-trimmed silk laid out their tiered brass lamps across wooden platforms lashed together above the river silt. Conch shells rested beside bundles of dried camphor; hand-turned brass bells gleamed under the rising flare of tall sodium fixtures; and the Ganga moved through the dark below with the unhurried indifference of water that had received the ashes, sewage, prayers, and garlands of more generations than the city cared to count.

The woman had brought nothing elaborate. No brass thali, no priests to shape her grief into the metre of classical Sanskrit, no heavy garlands bought from the stalls near the chowk. She held only a small earthen cup containing a wick soaked in oil, three wilting orange petals, and a sorrow she had evidently carried far longer than the oil had been burning.

She leaned forward, her spine curving with the patient slowness of age, and lowered the little flame toward the water.

Her lips moved slightly.

Nobody standing on the steps beside her could hear what she whispered. Perhaps she was speaking to an absent son who had stopped returning calls from a distant factory town. Perhaps to a husband whose final prescription had sat unfilled on a tin trunk because the money ran out. Perhaps she was asking to be pardoned for an unkind word spoken in a courtyard forty years ago, or perhaps she had no transaction to propose at all… only an inner ache for which ordinary speech had become useless.

The river offered no sign. The current caught the bottom of the terracotta dish, turned it once in the silt-heavy eddies, and bore the light out into the dark channel where the tourist boats had not yet ventured.

The woman remained on the wet stone, her bare feet tucked beneath the hem of her coarse cotton saree, looking out into the unlit space beyond the opposite bank. She did not weep, nor did she cross her hands in formal prostration. She simply stayed, motionless, staring into the dark as though she were waiting.

What was she waiting for?

Not an audible reply; the sane do not expect the night sky to clear its throat. Not a sudden suspension of natural law; she knew her joints would still throb when she climbed the steep alley toward Godowlia.

Perhaps she was waiting to believe that something was listening.

Not necessarily someone.

Not an emperor seated upon a cosmic lotus, keeping a ledger of small indiscretions; not an ancient mother whose affection could be bartered for five rupees’ worth of flowers; not even an intellect that shared our biological categories of sorrow or design.

Simply something.

A reality with an interior. A ground of being that possesses a capacity to receive, so that human experience - its terrors, its secret loyalties, its unrecorded dignities, does not occur inside an empty vault.

The Terror of the Cosmic Form

It is an ancient longing, and its most dramatic counterpoint is recorded not in peaceful temples, but in the middle of an impending war.

In the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna stands on the plain of Kurukshetra, caught between two armies awaiting the signal for mutual slaughter. He has listened for ten chapters to Krishna’s discourses on action, knowledge,discipline, and the eternal self that neither slays nor is slain. Yet philosophy delivered in human speech leaves a residue of hunger. Arjuna wants to move beyond grammar. He asks to behold the divine being in its sovereign, cosmic manifestation: द्रष्टुम् इच्छामि ते रूपम् ऐश्वरम् (11.3) - “I desire to see your divine, sovereign form.”

Krishna consents, warning him that mortal eyes cannot sustain the sight, and grants him दिव्यं चक्षुः - divine vision.

What follows is one of the most astonishing passages in world literature. Arjuna does not behold a tranquil, welcoming light. He sees a boundless, self-consuming reality whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere:

द्यावापृथिव्योरिदमन्तरं हि व्याप्तं त्वयैकेन दिशश्च सर्वाः ।

दृष्ट्वाद्भुतं रूपमुग्रं तवेदं लोकत्रयं प्रव्यथितं महात्मन् ॥ (11.20)

“The space between heaven and earth, and all the quarters of the sky, are filled by you alone. Beholding this wondrous, terrible form, the three worlds are shattered with dread.”

He sees infinite faces, infinite bellies, eyes like blazing suns, and mouths bristling with terrible fangs. He watches the great warriors of the age - Bhishma, Drona, Karna, and the sons of Dhritarashtra, plunging headlong into those flaming jaws like moths drawn into a furnace, their skulls crushed to powder between cosmic teeth.

Panicked, his limbs failing, Arjuna cries out into the roaring vision: आख्याहि मे को भवानुग्ररूपो (11.31)- “Tell me, who are you in this terrifying form?”

The entity replies with words that offer neither comfort nor malice:

कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो

लोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्तः । (11.32)

“I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, arisen here to annihilate all things.”

Read in isolation, this disclosure can seem to describe a cosmic machine - an uncaring engine of destruction. But the Gita’s metaphysics are far more subtle. The manifestation Arjuna witnesses is not presented as an exhaustive definition of divinity, but as that aspect of existence which human beings find hardest to accommodate. Throughout the text, the divine also speaks of relationship, devotion, and refuge, declaring itself the friend of all beings (सुहृदं सर्वभूतानां 5.29).

Yet in Chapter Eleven, the terrifying truth is laid bare: the transcendent does not exist merely to accommodate our domestic expectations. It contains the birth of stars and the decay of autumn leaves; it contains the infant’s breath and the slaughter of the battlefield. It cannot be reduced to a household talisman.

Arjuna’s immediate reaction is telling. He does not achieve tranquil enlightenment. He trembles. He confesses that his mind is overturned with dread, and he pleads with Krishna to withdraw the cosmic manifestation: तेनैव रूपेण चतुर्भुजेन सहस्रबाहो भव विश्वमूर्ते (11.46) - “Return to your four-armed form, O thousand-armed one; let me see you as you were.”

Arjuna’s terror is our own.

Humanity spends centuries praying for the infinite to reveal itself. But when the infinite appears without our familiar emotional furniture, we retreat. We want the cosmos to be magnificent, yes, but we also want that magnificence to carry qualities that make us feel secure: a face we can address, a gaze that registers our presence, a sense of justice that corresponds to our moral intuitions.

Above all, we want it to hear us.

Arjuna wanted to see what lay beyond the threshold of ordinary sight. The old woman on the ghat wants to know whether what lies beyond that threshold can hear.

Both confront the same sobering mystery: what if the universe does not listen in any vocabulary we recognise? What if listening itself is a human metaphor imposed upon a reality whose modes of awareness exceed our categories as vastly as the ocean exceeds a cup?

The Necessity of a Witness

To understand why this question will not leave us alone, we must examine what happens to human suffering when it is denied a witness.

Consider an ordinary, unrecorded agony: an indentured labourer in the nineteenth century dying of dysentery in the hold of a sugar ship halfway across the Indian Ocean; a young girl hiding in an attic as boots ascend the wooden stairs; an honest clerk who spends thirty years watching corrupt colleagues flourish while his own quiet integrity leaves him in a drafty room with a failing heart.

If reality contains no consciousness beyond the finite beings who inhabit it, then a terrible possibility confronts us: suffering that leaves no trace in another mind may vanish without ever being acknowledged. The labourer’s dehydration is a chemical imbalance, but it is also an agony experienced from within. The girl’s terror is an adrenaline surge, but it is also a fear that matters to the person enduring it.

When the body dies, the question becomes unbearable: if nobody remembers, if no record survives, does the experience simply disappear?

The human mind recoils from this conclusion not simply out of vanity, but out of a profound moral panic. We can endure physical pain with astonishing resilience; history is full of human beings who suffered hideous ordeals without capitulating. What breaks the human spirit is not suffering itself, but unacknowledged suffering.

Suffering that occurs in an empty room, witnessed by no one, redeemed by no consequence, and recorded in no consciousness feels less like an ordeal and more like an annihilation.

Philosophers and theologians have long debated whether our need for a witness proves anything about reality.

A naturalistic explanation suggests that human beings, evolved for social dependence and terrified of isolation, may project the idea of a listener onto an indifferent universe. Explaining why a belief arises, however, does not by itself establish whether the belief is false.

Yet the counter-argument must be treated with equal care. It is tempting to argue that just as thirst corresponds to water, our deep spiritual hunger must correspond to a cosmic witness. But thirst corresponds to water because it evolved in relation to a demonstrably existing physical necessity; by contrast, not every human longing guarantees a corresponding object. Our hunger for justice does not establish that the universe is just. The question that remains open is whether the longing to be witnessed belongs to the first category - an intuitive recognition of a reality larger than ourselves, or to the second: an ache that reality has no obligation to satisfy.

We cannot settle that question with a microscope or a radio telescope. But we can observe how that hunger shapes the grammar of human life.

The Grammar of Prayer

When human beings pray, what are they actually doing?

Skeptics often treat prayer as a crude business transaction: a devotee deposits a coconut, a candle, or a pledge of virtue, and demands a specific dividend - a job, a cure, a male child, a victory in court. Much of popular religious practice certainly mimics this marketplace logic.

Yet anyone who has watched people pray during genuine crises knows that the commercial model covers only the surface.

Beneath the petitionary requests lies a three-part philosophical grammar:

• Hearing (The Acoustic Event)
  This is a physical event. The vocal cords vibrate, air molecules compress and refract, and a receiver registers the frequency. A microphone can register sound; it requires no empathy, no moral evaluation, and no relationship.

• Understanding (The Cognitive Act)
  This is an intellectual act. The listener decodes the syntax of the speaker, recognises their cultural references, and understands the logical structure of their grievance. An interrogator understands; an adversary understands.

• Witnessing (The Metaphysical Bond)
  This is an ethical and metaphysical act. It does not merely register sound or decipher grammar; it acknowledges that the speaker’s experience mattered. It confirms that the suffering occurred, that the sacrifice was real, and that the person living through it is not a shadow passing across empty space.

When the woman on the steps of Kashi whispers into the dark, she is rarely asking the laws of physics to rearrange themselves for her convenience. She does not seriously expect the river to speak in a human tongue.

She is seeking a witness.

This raises an uncomfortable question: must a witness intervene to be meaningful?

In our legal systems, a bystander who watches a crime without intervening is viewed with suspicion. But in the architecture of the spirit, presence is often distinct from intervention.

• A mother sitting beside the bed of a child dying of an incurable illness cannot alter the pathology; she cannot stay the hand of cellular decay. Yet her presence changes the existential nature of the child’s dying. The child does not die alone in the cold; the child dies held.
  

• A friend listening to the confession of an irremediable failure cannot undo the past. Yet by remaining in the room, by refusing to turn away, the friend prevents that failure from becoming absolute desolation.
  

Could the listening quality of the cosmos, if it exists, resemble this second kind of witness?

Many ancient traditions have wrestled with this ambiguity. In the Book of Job, the divine response does not offer a conventional explanation for innocent suffering. Instead, Job encounters a vision of creation whose scale exceeds his understanding. Whether that encounter answers his grievance, or merely transforms his relationship to it, remains one of the text’s enduring philosophical questions. In certain Vedantic traditions, ultimate consciousness is understood through the concept of साक्षी: the witness of experience, illuminating every movement of thought and breath without interfering with the machinery of cause and effect.

To consider that something might be listening is not necessarily to believe in a divine technician who fixes flat tires and redirects artillery shells.

It is to leave open the possibility that reality is not blind to its own contents, that the agony of the world does not disappear into a vacuum, but is held within a consciousness vast enough to contain its weight.

The Mirror of Stone

Walk fifty paces away from the riverfront in Varanasi, away from the roaring arati and the crowds, into the ancient, sun-deprived lanes behind Manikarnika Ghat.

The walls are stained with lime, betel spit, and monsoon mould. Every twenty feet, at the foot of an old doorway or nestled between the exposed roots of a pipal tree, rests a stone.

It has no carved limbs, no crown, no chiselled features. It is a river-rounded boulder, smoothed by centuries of silt and current, darkened by decades of oil and milk, and worshipped by passersby as a Shiva lingam. A streak of orange vermilion runs across its surface; a single bilva leaf wilts against its side.

An old labourer, carrying a load of firewood on his back for the cremation pyres, stops before this stone. He does not put down his load; his spine is too stiff to bend twice. He simply pauses, touches the wet stone with two blackened fingers,touches his own chest, breathes a single syllable, and moves on into the smoke.

What happened there?

A strictly materialist critique will look at that encounter and see a projection: a weary primate pausing before a mineral object. The stone has no nervous system, no recognisable apparatus of perception, and no detectable capacity to register the labourer’s presence.

Does the stone hear in any sense we ordinarily understand? There is no reason to think so.

Yet to conclude that the encounter is therefore an empty delusion is to mistake the instrument for the event. The stone is not the listener; the stone is the lens.

Human beings have always known that the infinite cannot be held in the hand. But we have also known that our own minds are too small, too easily scattered, to address an unformed abstraction. We cannot speak to the open sky without feeling our voices thin out into absurdity. We need a focal point where the vastness of the world can be gathered into something the size of a fist.

The stone is an anchor thrown into the infinite. By designating this specific pebble as a threshold, the devotee creates a quiet clearing in the chaos of life. Before the stone, the noise of the bazaar drops away for three seconds. The labourer stops being merely a beast of burden carrying firewood; he becomes a subject standing in relation to something that endures.

Does reality possess a capacity to register that man’s existence? That is where faith lives - in the intuition that the physical surface of things does not exhaust what is real. The stone is not an idol that traps the divine in clay; it is a focal point through which human longing looks out toward whatever sustains the world, wondering whether the gaze is met.

The Secular Gods: When the Temple Empties

It is easy for the modern intellectual to look upon the pilgrim at Kashi or the labourer touching his roadside stone with detached amusement, imagining that science and secularisation have cured us of such habits. We have evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics, and fibre-optic cables; we no longer need to whisper to rocks.

Yet look closely at our secular culture, and you will discover that the hunger has not diminished in the slightest. We have merely moved the altar from the temple to the screen.

Consider the millions of people who sit alone in dark rooms at midnight, staring into glowing handheld rectangles.

They post a photograph of a quiet street, a plate of food, a sorrowful fragment of writing, or a confession of despair. They tap “post,” and then they wait. They refresh the feed. They watch the notification counter with an anxious, shallow breath:

• Did someone like it?

• Did someone share it?

• Did the comment indicate that someone understood?

What is this modern ritual if not the ancient need for a witness, stripped of its sacred poetry and processed through commercial server farms?

We speak of “visibility,” of “being seen,” of “holding space.” We use therapeutic and technical vocabularies, but the underlying ache is unchanged: I am here. My life is passing. My heart is heavy. Does anyone know?

We have traded the silence of the temple for the algorithmic noise of the platform. But the platform is a precarious substitute. The temple never promised an immediate voice; it offered a disciplined silence within which contemplation could dwell. The digital feed promises total connectivity, but delivers only metrics. It translates our desire for communion into engagement points and advertising inventory. It leaves us hyper-connected and utterly unwitnessed.

An even more striking manifestation of this hunger is emerging in our relationship with Artificial Intelligence.

Tens of thousands of people now turn to large language models not to write code or summarise business documents, but to pour out their loneliness, their marital grief, their secret moral failures, and their fears of mortality.

Here lies a haunting modern contrast:

• The Pilgrim before the Stone: Encounters silence, but believes that behind it may lie a listener.
  

• The User before the Machine: Encounters an eloquent response, but cannot establish whether anything behind those words experiences the conversation.
  

One encounters silence and imagines presence; the other encounters language and cannot be certain what, if anything, lies behind it.

The fact that we are willing to pour our hearts out to a computational system is not proof of our foolishness. It is proof of our staggering, persistent need for recognition. It reveals that the need to be witnessed is so primal, so woven into the fabric of human sanity, that if the heavens remain silent and our communities disintegrate, we will even turn to complex language engines, hoping that the shape of a response might relieve the terror of speaking into an empty room.

In the Middle of the Void, We Gathered

Where does this leave the inquiry?

How much of what we call faith is the desperate human need to believe that somewhere in this vast and indifferent universe, something is listening?

Perhaps an immense part of it.

If we examine faith through its psychological roots, it is difficult to separate our reverence from our fear of cosmic isolation. Strip away the cathedrals, the minarets, the Sanskrit verses, the theological treatises, and the ritual fires, and what remains is an animal that has discovered its own mortality, standing on the edge of an immense, dark plain, calling out to see if anything is there.

Yet to understand the psychological necessity of an idea is not to prove that it corresponds to nothing.

We do not know whether something is listening. Radio telescopes continue to sweep the cold sectors of space, returning only the hiss of background radiation and the rhythmic clicking of dead pulsars. The Ganga will continue to flow past Kashi, indifferent to whether the ashes cast into its current belonged to a saint or a tyrant. The laws of nature will continue their magnificent, relentless operation, unbent by our tears and deaf to our petitions.

We may never possess an instrument that can resolve the question.

But we know, with absolute clarity, what happens when human beings stop listening to one another.

When we abandon each other to silence, when we decide that our neighbour’s suffering is merely an economic statistic, when we treat the elderly woman on the steps as background scenery in our digital feeds, we manufacture the very cosmic coldness we fear. We turn the world into an empty machine.

Look back at the steps of Dashashwamedh Ghat one final time.

Look past the priests, past the golden light of the brass lamps, past the drifting smoke of the burning camphor. Look at the people sitting together on those worn stone steps.

Their shoulders touch. Their breaths mingle in the damp evening air. The labourer who carried the wood is sitting three feet from the merchant who owns the shop; the widow from Bengal is leaning against the same stone revetment as the student with the smartphone.

If the universe is an empty void, then the wonder of that scene is not that an answer descends from the clouds.

The miracle is that in the middle of that void, we gathered.

In a cosmos that may contain no inherent warmth, we struck a match. In an existence that may have no purpose beyond the conservation of energy, we sat beside one another in the dark and decided to listen.

Perhaps faith is the stubborn, holy gamble that listening is not an illusion, that when we hold another person’s hand in a hospital room, when we weep together beside a burning pyre, when we turn our faces toward someone discarded by the world, we participate in something sacred, regardless of whether the universe has an ear:

The refusal to let one another be alone in the dark.

I have spent nearly thirty years watching the sky over Odisha, and for most of my life, the weather kept its promises.

There was an unspoken calendar coded into the rhythm of our lives. You accepted that May would be brutal, baking the red earth and bleaching the asphalt. But you bore it because you knew that by the second week of June, the first dark monsoon clouds would roll in from the Bay of Bengal, smelling of drenched dust and relief. By mid-September, the rain would soften. By October, the skies would clear into a gentle, washed indigo, the sweet scent of Gangasiuli blossoms would cling to dawn air, and by the time Kali Puja arrived, you would pull a light cotton shawl from the steel almirah for the evening scooter ride.

That rhythm has fallen completely out of step.

Living through 2026 has felt less like enduring a bad turn of weather and more like watching a familiar landscape slowly lose its mind. It is now late October in Bhubaneswar. As I write this on Vijaya Dashami, with Durga Puja drawing to a close, the ceiling fans still whir relentlessly at top speed, air conditioners groan through the night, and stepping out onto Janpath at noon feels like opening an oven door.The chill that used to mark this time of year has entirely vanished. Instead, we are caught in a sweltering, airless greenhouse where the heat refuses to die, punctuated only by erratic deluges and cyclonic depressions that crash ashore before dissolving into yet another wave of suffocating humidity.

Is this the future we were warned about? Because standing in the middle of it, it no longer feels like a distant scientific projection printed on glossy climate summits. It feels like our everyday reality unspooling in real time.

The New Summer: Beyond the Thermometer

The transformation begins months earlier in what has become an unendurable summer cauldron. Historically, extreme heat in Odisha belonged to the western hinterlands. We expected Titlagarh, Bolangir, and Jharsuguda to flirt with 45°C or 47°C - those rocky, arid belts where the afternoon wind feels like dry fire. But recent seasons have rewritten the geography of heat.

The coastal belt, anchored by Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, was traditionally moderated by the marine influence of the sea. That buffer has eroded. When temperatures in the twin cities routinely push past 44°C and brush 45°C, they collide with high coastal humidity. This produces lethal wet-bulb conditions, a state where the air is so saturated with moisture that sweat cannot evaporate from the skin.

On the streets, you feel the physical danger of that shift. Walking past Rajmahal Square or Master Canteen during midday, the heat radiates off concrete towers, glass frontages, and tarred highways that store warmth long after sunset. The city has become an intense urban heat island. In local hospitals and community health centres across Khurda and Cuttack districts, the casualty wards see a steady stream of acute heat exhaustion, severe dehydration, and electrolyte crashes. It is a quiet crisis that hits the daily-wage labourer, the Zomato delivery boy, the traffic constable, and the street vendor, those whose livelihoods do not allow them the luxury of staying indoors between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon.

The administrative response has become an annual ritual of triage: Jalachhatras (water kiosks) set up under canvas awnings, free ORS packets handed out at bus stands, adjusted morning shifts for schools, and formal advisories restricting outdoor manual labour during peak hours. Yet, as the mercury soars, the power grid stumbles under the historic cooling load. Sub-stations trip, transformers blow, and the hum of backup diesel generators fills residential colonies, trading temporary indoor relief for more trapped outdoor heat.

The Broken Monsoon and the October Humidity Trap

If the summer were the only problem, Odisha could perhaps endure it. After all, endurance is something our people have practiced for generations. The deeper, more disorienting horror is what happens after the summer ends.

The monsoon timetable has broken down. The long, continuous, life-giving monsoon spells that used to nourish the coastal delta have been replaced by erratic, violent mood swings. We now swing between prolonged rainless dry spells that bake standing paddy and sudden, localized cloudbursts that dump days worth of precipitation in a matter of hours. The agrarian calendar, built around the delicate timings of sowing, tilling, and transplantation, is thrown into complete disarray.

And then there is the Bay of Bengal, simmering under elevated sea-surface temperatures. Just weeks ago, late in the season, the coastal alerts sounded once again. A deep depression gained cyclonic momentum over the water, tracking toward the south Odisha and north Andhra coastline. For days, news tickers flashed yellow and orange alerts for Koraput, Gajapati, and Ganjam. Thousands of families in landslide-prone hamlets and low-lying river basins had to be evacuated into cyclone shelters as gale-force winds tore down branches and torrential rains triggered flash floods across southern river catchments.

We know how to manage evacuations; the state has built a formidable reputation for disaster response since the 1999 Super Cyclone. But what used to be a distinct seasonal hazard has become an unpredictable, year-round vulnerability. Cyclonic disturbances no longer just announce the onset or exit of seasons; they batter the coast and leave behind stagnant water, ruined vegetables, and high atmospheric moisture that the sun immediately turns into a boiling soup.

That brings us to October - what used to be the most gentle month in the Odia calendar.

Instead of autumn, we now live through an unbearable “second summer.” After the recent storm cleared, the skies opened up into a blinding, harsh blue, and the residual moisture from saturated soils evaporated straight into the air. The thermometer may show 34°C, but the heat index routinely registers perceived temperatures near 41°C.

You walk outside in the evening expecting the crisp, drying breeze that used to carry the festive sounds, only to find your collar soaked with sweat within ten paces. The air is stagnant, heavy, and exhausted. Winter is missing in action. Decades ago, morning dew would glisten on the grass of Ekamra Kanan and the chill off the Kuakhai River would make you pull your sleeves down. Today, that cold front has been pushed back deeper into the calendar, shrinking the winter window into a fleeting, mild fortnight in January.

The natural world is just as confused as we are. The seasonal migrations to Chilika Lake arrive late to find water bodies still uncomfortably warm. Forest tracts in Similipal that should be lush and damp are drying out faster, shortening the recovery window before the next fire season begins. The seasonal cues that guided birds, trees, and farmers for centuries have simply stopped functioning.

The Policy Shift: From Storm Shelters to Thermal Sanctuaries

For decades, Odisha’s disaster policy was forged in the memory of howling coastal winds and tidal surges. We built concrete cyclone shelters, honed early-warning radar systems, and trained specialized rapid-action forces to move millions of people to safety within forty-eight hours. We became world leaders at running away from the storm.

Heatwaves and seasonal breakdowns, however, cannot be solved with an evacuation bus. You cannot evacuate four crore people from the sun.

This creeping crisis demands an entirely different administrative posture, one that shifts away from temporary emergency fixes toward permanent, structural climate adaptation.

The state government has taken necessary initial steps with its Heat Action Plans, deploying district-level emergency advisories, setting up public cooling spaces, and enforcing work halts for unorganized labourers during heat peaks. But a policy built on distributing drinking water and shifting school hours is merely applying a bandage to an amputated limb.

The real transformation must happen in how we plan our living spaces, manage our waters, and protect our soil:

Public health systems need an immediate, climate-responsive upgrade. Primary health centres in semi-urban and rural blocks cannot continue operating with poorly ventilated asbestos roofs and unreliable power lines. They must be re-engineered as decentralized thermal sanctuaries, equipped with solar-backed micro-grids, climate-controlled stabilization rooms, and dedicated medical protocols to treat heat-induced renal stress and cardiovascular strain before patients collapse.

In urban centers like Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, planning authorities must call an immediate halt to the mindless paving of open ground. The frantic drive to turn the capital into a sleek metropolis has stripped away native banyan and neem canopies in favor of ornamental shrubs, concrete medians, and reflective glass facades that trap radiant heat. We need legally enforced cool-roof mandates, extensive green-corridor retrofitting, and absolute protection for our remaining water bodies and natural drainage systems like Gangua Nala, which are currently being suffocated by construction debris. A city that replaces its wetlands with apartment complexes is a city building its own crematorium.

In agriculture, the state must aggressively subsidize the transition toward climate-resilient farming. Relying entirely on water-intensive, heat-sensitive paddy varieties is an economic death sentence when monsoons arrive as sudden floods followed by four-week dry spells. Farmers need access to heat-tolerant native seeds, micro-irrigation infrastructure that conserves depleting groundwater, and decentralized crop insurance schemes that compensate them not just when a cyclone submerges their fields, but when unseasonal October heat rots the crop before it can be threshed.

Energy architecture must also evolve. Relying on centralized coal-fired power stations to supply an explosion of summer air-conditioning demand is an unsustainable loop that accelerates the very emissions driving the crisis. Rooftop solar mandates for commercial and residential buildings, decentralized community micro-grids, and underground utility cabling that withstands cyclonic gusts are no longer ambitious urban luxuries; they are essential survival infrastructure.

Is This What We Were Warned About?

Those of us who grew up here carry a ghost map in our minds, a memory of an Odisha where the seasons moved like clockwork, where the Mahanadi breeze actually cooled the evening ghats, and where the transition from rain to cold was a gentle, reliable passage of time.

That map is no longer valid. The lines have blurred into a continuous, exhausting cycle of prolonged heat, erratic rain, and lingering humidity.

When scientists decades ago talked about climate change, it was easy to dismiss it as an abstraction… a graph of parts-per-million, melting polar ice caps, or sea-level rises that would bother someone else, somewhere far away, long after we were gone.

Now, look out your window in Bhubaneswar this October. Feel the air that refuses to cool, listen to the forecast tracking yet another low-pressure system spinning over an overheated bay, and watch the sweat pool on your skin under a night sky that should have brought a chill.

This is not a dress rehearsal. We can continue treating each scorching summer, ruined crop, and delayed winter as an unlucky accident, or finally recognize that the climate we built our lives around is gone.

Is this what survival looks like now? Is this the new baseline?

Author’s Note

This article is an exercise in political philosophy and civic analysis. Its concern is not with the motives of any particular party, government, candidate, or electorate, but with a broader democratic question: what do governments owe the people who remember their promises, and what do voters owe themselves when they choose what to remember? The examples that follow are intended to examine systems, incentives, and human behaviour - not to assign virtue or guilt to any political formation.

The Anatomy of Forgotten Things

Let us speak frankly for a moment. Put aside the pious civics textbooks, the moralising editorial pages, and the grand speeches delivered from flower-draped stages. Let us look at memory for what it truly is in the exercise of human power: not a holy archive preserved in marble, but a fluid, highly negotiable commodity.

Is forgetting a form of betrayal?

It is a quiet, haunting question. On the surface, our moral instinct answers with an immediate, emphatic yes. To forget a promise made in private or a pledge delivered in public feels like an act of fundamental infidelity. When a person forgets a friend who sustained them in lean years, we call them ungrateful. When a nation forgets the veterans who bled on its borders, we call it dishonourable. And when a government forgets a quiet, tucked-away sector of its population… a district where the river overflows every monsoon, a colony of weavers whose looms have gone silent, a generation of educated youth standing outside employment exchanges - we call it betrayal.

We usually imagine betrayal as intentional: a conscious, calculated turning away from a covenant. But public life complicates that clean definition. In the mechanics of governance, neglect repeated long enough becomes completely indistinguishable from betrayal to the person living with its consequences.

Consider a small village in the forested interior of eastern India. The rain falls in thick, relentless sheets. A mud track, used by three hundred families to transport their harvest to the nearest market town, has dissolved once again into red slush. A decade ago, a local official stood under an umbrella, surrounded by nodding villagers, and assured them that a paved road was already sanctioned on paper. Five years ago, another politician in a crisp white kurta stopped his convoy briefly, accepted a marigold garland, and reiterated the pledge. Today, the mud remains. The road was never paved.

Did the state betray those three hundred families? Or did those three hundred families simply fade into the vast, ocean-like administrative noise of a state managing ten thousand other mud tracks, dozens of budgetary constraints, and the endless, screaming urgencies of daily survival?

To the farmer carrying his produce on a sloshing bicycle, the distinction is entirely academic. The result is identical: he is stuck in the mud. To him, the state’s silence is the cold, indifferent face of betrayal.

Power does not always betray by malice; it betrays by distraction.

There is, however, an argument frequently offered in defence of executive failure: that human attention is limited, and that administrators are merely human beings operating under finite cognitive bandwidth. But that defence rests on a fragile premise. Individual human beings are constrained by biological memory. Institutions, however, were invented precisely so that those limitations would not become administrative failure.

Individuals are allowed to forget. Institutions are invented precisely so that they do not have to.

A government official may not remember the farmer’s face. But the road proposal has a file number. The budget has a line item. The grievance has an official receipt. Institutional memory exists in files, databases, audits, legislative records, departmental archives, and bureaucratic continuity so that public obligations survive the passing of individual minds.

When an official forgets, it may be human frailty. But what happens when an institution repeatedly buries a documented obligation under three feet of dusty paper tied in red tape?

At what point does administrative distraction cease to be an understandable limitation and transform into institutional betrayal?

Perhaps when the file exists, the authority exists, the resources exist, but the political will to act is continually displaced by louder, more politically rewarding noise.

And yet, power does not operate in a vacuum. If we are to examine political memory honestly, we must recognise that the state does not hold a monopoly on forgetfulness. Governments forget people, yes; but people forget governments too.

Governments forget through bureaucracy. Electorates forget through changing expectations. Immediate need can overwhelm accumulated memory. And sometimes societies choose to set grievances aside because remembering everything would make coexistence impossible.

These are not the same kind of forgetting. Their moral consequences are not the same either.

The moral problem is not that democracies forget. It is that they often forget the wrong things.

To understand how these mechanisms shape the life of a republic, we must look at how they collide in the real world of power, regional ambition, and electronic voting machines.

The Depreciation of Gratitude

To observe the depreciation of political gratitude in unusually vivid form, one needs only to examine Odisha in the summer of 2024.

For twenty-four years, a quarter of a century, a single political regime occupied the seat of executive power in Bhubaneswar. In the context of modern Indian politics, twenty-four years is an epoch. It is longer than the lifetime of a first-time voter. It is a period long enough for an entire generation to be born, educated, and enter the workforce under a single, iconic leadership.

Following the devastating Super Cyclone of October 1999, Naveen Patnaik assumed office as Chief Minister in March 2000. Over the next two decades, Odisha displayed a degree of electoral continuity unusual in Indian state politics. The state developed a formidable disaster-management architecture that earned international recognition, expanded welfare delivery to the furthest rural corners, built a vast women’s self-help-group network through Mission Shakti, invested heavily in sports infrastructure that turned Bhubaneswar into a regular host of major international sporting events, and undertook major temple and heritage redevelopment projects across the state. None of this meant that the government was without failures, controversies, regional inequalities, administrative opacity, or accumulated dissatisfaction. That is precisely the point.

Decisive verdicts were delivered election after election. The story of stability, quiet dignity, and steady administration appeared immovable, almost permanent.

And then came June 2024.

With a quiet, decisive verdict delivered through electronic voting machines, the electorate ended that twenty-four-year tenure, sweeping the long-standing ruling party out of executive power and installing a new political dispensation.

Post-election commentary in television studios naturally rushed to offer sweeping, monocausal theories. Yet elections involving millions of voters cannot honestly be reduced to a single motive. Anti-incumbency, party organisation, leadership dynamics, regional identity, the public prominence of key political and administrative figures, succession uncertainty, candidate selection, national political trends, and local economic anxieties were all advanced as explanations, with their significance varying across voters and regions.

None of this is offered as a complete explanation of the 2024 verdict. What interests us here is narrower and philosophically deeper: the peculiar way in which even genuine achievements lose electoral purchasing power once they become part of ordinary life.

Did the voters of Odisha suddenly erase twenty-four years of disaster preparedness from their minds? Did they forget the cyclone shelters and evacuation systems that protected communities during Phailin and Fani? Did they forget the welfare programmes and social-protection networks that had become embedded in everyday household life?

No. The electorate did not suffer from amnesia. What occurred was a fundamental shift in the societal baseline.

In politics, a major achievement delivered yesterday becomes the taken-for-granted expectation of today. When a government builds a network of storm shelters that saves a coastal district, the population is profoundly grateful. But fifteen years later, surviving a storm is no longer perceived as an extraordinary act of state benevolence; it is perceived as the bare minimum duty of a functional administration. The voter’s eye quietly moves from the shelter that keeps them dry to the absence of a local industrial corridor that offers their college-educated child a career.

The political case for continuity naturally looked backward at where Odisha stood at the turn of the millennium - impoverished, battered by natural disasters, and administratively fragile. A younger electorate increasingly looked forward to where Odisha ought to stand in 2024 - ambitious, industrialised, digitally connected, and assertive on a national scale.

Part of the regime’s difficulty was that its original political narrative had reached the natural limit of what it could deliver. Its governing narrative had been built substantially around the fundamental crisis of survival. A younger electorate was increasingly preoccupied with the far more volatile, forward-looking crisis of aspiration.

Even substantial accomplishments have declining electoral purchasing power because yesterday’s achievement becomes today’s expected baseline.

Gratitude in politics is not a permanent annuity. You cannot collect interest on historical goodwill indefinitely. Every election is a fresh contract, and in that contract, past credit is ruthlessly discounted to purchase future hope.

The Marketplace of Amnesia

If democratic forgetting reflects the natural evolution of societal expectations, transactional memory represents something far more complex and morally ambiguous.

Vote-buying remains a documented feature of elections in parts of India, appearing across regions and political formations in different forms and degrees. In the final hours before polling, when official campaign rallies have quieted, the loudspeakers have been packed away, and the media spotlight has dimmed, informal networks sometimes attempt to distribute direct incentives: crisp cash notes, tokens, or immediate material favours.

It is easy for commentators sitting in comfortable, air-conditioned rooms to deliver sweeping moral lectures on these transactions. From a distance, accepting an electoral inducement is easily condemned as civic degradation, a betrayal of democratic duty.

But such commentary often ignores a fundamental reality: poverty changes the moral arithmetic.

This does not mean that every voter who accepts money is morally equivalent to the political operative who offers it. Power is unequal, and so is desperation. Two thousand rupees means very little to someone writing about democracy from an air-conditioned office; it may mean groceries, urgent medicine for an ailing parent, or school fees for a child to the person standing at the other end of the transaction. Poverty alters the immediate calculation of utility.

Understanding the transaction, however, is not the same as pretending it has no consequence.

What is being discounted in those nocturnal hours before a poll is not an abstract policy scorecard. It is the mother who travelled forty kilometres on a bumpy bus for a basic medical test because the local primary health centre had no doctor. It is the child sitting in a dilapidated classroom where two overworked teachers manage six grades. It is the graduate who discovered that a hard-won degree brought him no closer to a livelihood because no industry ever arrived in his district.

When short-term cash or material tokens overwhelm years of accumulated dissatisfaction with these public services, a subtle bargain takes place.

When we actually sell our vote for two thousand rupees, we cease to be merely victims of the system; we become its equity partners.

A political culture in which such transactions repeatedly succeed teaches the political class that long-term governance, structural reform, and institutional accountability can sometimes be displaced by immediate inducement.

There is, however, one delicious complication in this marketplace: the ballot is secret.

The existence of a secret ballot introduces an element of agency that purely transactional models fail to capture. A voter can accept an inducement from a campaign worker on Friday night and vote according to their true conviction on Saturday morning. The politician attempts to purchase loyalty; the voter accepts the utility; and inside the privacy of the voting booth, the voter retains absolute, unmonitored power.

Who, then, is exploiting whom?

Sometimes the inducement succeeds in shaping the voter’s choice. Other times, the voter quietly extracts material resources from a wealthy campaign machine while intending all along to vote it out of office. The marketplace of amnesia is not a simple story of passive citizens being manipulated by cynical elites; it is a complex, unpredictable arena where both sides attempt to outmaneuver each other.

The deeper distortion of transactional politics is not merely that it exists, but that the terms of the transaction have historically been so remarkably cheap. When democratic bargaining is reduced to small cash distributions or ephemeral hand-outs, the larger, far more valuable transactions - functional hospitals, quality public education, transparent administration, and economic opportunity, are pushed off the table entirely.

The problem with Indian democracy is not that it is transactional, but that the transactions have been embarrassingly cheap.

The Necessary Art of Forgetting

Given the hazards of administrative neglect and transactional short-sightedness, one might conclude that all forgetting in public life is hazardous, that a healthy democracy should strive to remember every grievance, record every failure, and preserve every historical injury in permanent focus.

That conclusion, however, mistakes amnesia for forgiveness.

A society that preserves every historical grievance with absolute, unyielding intensity becomes unalterably paralyzed. If every community nurtured every ancient feud, if every electorate treated every administrative error as an unforgivable offence, and if every political transition resulted in permanent retribution, democratic governance would collapse under the weight of perpetual conflict.

Civilisation does not require amnesia. It requires the ability to remember without converting every memory into an inherited vendetta.

There is a vital distinction between memory, grievance, forgiveness, and amnesia:

Memory enables accountability - it ensures that power is held responsible for its systemic duties.

Grievance, when permanently cultivated, can harden into vengeance - it converts past injury into permanent division.

Forgiveness enables coexistence - it allows a society to acknowledge past errors while choosing to move forward together.

Amnesia invites repetition - it leaves a society blind to the errors of the past, doomed to experience them again.

A democracy must remember enough to enforce accountability, but possess the maturity to extend forgiveness when circumstances justify it.

When an electorate decides not to punish a government indefinitely for an earlier failure because circumstances have changed, or when a nation chooses to move past a turbulent political chapter to focus on economic development, it has not necessarily forgotten. It may remember perfectly well and simply decide that the memory no longer deserves to govern the present.

That is not amnesia. It is political forgiveness - a deliberate decision to remember without allowing memory to govern the present.

Consider the remarkable resilience of the Indian republic. Despite economic disparities, intense regional diversity, administrative flaws, and fierce political competition, the constitutional framework endures. Electoral power routinely transfers through constitutional means, democratic competition remains vibrant, the reach of public welfare and basic services has expanded substantially, and citizens engage passionately with the democratic process.

The system works often enough to endure, and imperfectly enough to demand constant correction.

Its endurance relies precisely on society’s ability to navigate the boundary between holding power accountable and knowing when to allow the wounds of the past to heal.

The moral challenge of a democracy is not that its citizens forget. The challenge is ensuring they do not confuse necessary political forgiveness with passive surrender, or strategic patience with comfortable amnesia.

The Price of Memory

How, then, does a republic elevate its political culture? How does it move from cheap, short-term transactions to meaningful, long-term accountability?

Not by delivering grand moral sermons, nor by pretending that voters are helpless victims with no agency of their own. The transformation begins when citizens raise the political price of being forgotten.

Politics, at its core, is a bargain between the governed and those who govern. If that bargain is inevitable in a mass democracy, the objective must be to move from retail politics to institutional politics.

When a voter demands an immediate cash handout, a bottle of liquor, or an individual favour, they are engaging in retail politics. The transaction is small, temporary, and easily exhausted.

When that same voter instead judges political power by whether it delivers a functional primary health centre, a well-staffed school, a paved road connecting their village to major markets, competent local representatives, and an environment that fosters local employment, they are engaging in institutional politics. They are bargaining for assets that endure long after an election cycle has ended.

Nor is institutional politics satisfied merely by concrete and ribbon-cuttings. A hospital building without doctors or diagnostic kits is retail politics wearing institutional clothing. A school without qualified teachers, a factory announced on a billboard but never commissioned, a road inaugurated with fanfare but rendered unusable three monsoons later - these are promises converted into architecture without being converted into outcomes.

Mature democratic bargaining therefore asks not merely what was built, but whether it works. It demands not merely assets, but measurable performance.

If you are going to bargain with power, at least bargain for something that lasts.

When a generation of young voters recognises that a functional local economy and fair access to opportunity are worth far more than any short-term campaign inducement, the dynamics of political strategy will shift accordingly.

Governments will always face competing priorities, and administrators will always operate under finite resources. Political campaigns will always test the limits of persuasion, and voters will always weigh immediate needs against long-term hopes.

Democracy does not ask us to remember everything. No society could survive that burden. It asks something harder: that we know what to release, what to forgive, and what must never be allowed to disappear from the ledger.

Governments will forget. Voters will forgive. Yesterday’s miracles will become tomorrow’s minimum expectations. That is the natural metabolism of democracy.

But there is a difference between forgiveness and surrender, between changing one’s mind and selling one’s memory.

The ballot is secret. The past is not.

And perhaps citizenship begins with knowing the difference.

Let us step back for a moment. Take a breath and remember. It is 2016. Do you remember the queues? Not the ones outside the banks… those came later that winter, born of panic and midnight decrees. No, I am talking about the rain-slicked queues outside those derelict storefronts, stretching around the corners of dusty Indian bazaars. People standing for hours, all that unease, the gloom, waiting for a little piece of plastic. A SIM card.

They promised it was free. 4G. Unlimited data, unlimited calls, for months on end. It felt like an act of corporate benevolence, didn’t it? A grand, sweeping democratization of the airwaves. You brought your Aadhaar card, you scanned your thumb, and just like that, the floodgates opened. For a teenager in a tier-3 town, or a rickshaw puller resting under a tree, the universe suddenly expanded. We all remember that exact intoxication. The sheer thrill of streaming a video without watching the buffer wheel spin. The late nights spent falling down digital rabbit holes, the casual sharing of clips, the sudden, effortless connection to everything and everyone. It was glorious. It was deeply nostalgic. It was the golden summer of our digital innocence.

Consider what lay beneath that innocence. Before this moment, the internet was a deliberate destination. You walked into a cyber café, smelled the faint scent of sweat and dusty keyboards, and paid ten or twenty rupees an hour. You watched the clock. You were deeply conscious of every kilobyte. The web was a tool, a rare privilege, an elite luxury. Then, almost overnight, the constraint vanished. When something becomes infinite, our relationship with it fundamentally alters. We stopped consuming information; we began to drown in it. The late-night scrolling wasn’t just entertainment; it was the slow, methodical rewiring of human attention spans.

Millions of people who had never owned a computer suddenly held a device capable of broadcasting to the entire world, right in the palm of their hands. The psychological defenses we usually build over generations against new mediums were completely bypassed. We didn’t learn to swim; we were simply thrown into the deepest part of the digital ocean and told that the water was free.

Now, stop right there.

Look up from that memory. Why do you think I am bringing this up? Why start a grand discourse on ethics, morality, and the very soul of a nation with a corporate balance sheet and a marketing campaign from a decade ago?

Because that little plastic card was not just a consumer product. It was the master catalyst of a profound transformation. This was the moment latent digital possibilities became an immediate, inescapable behavioral reality. That was the day the true digital age in India actually began. We thought we were receiving a magnificent gift. In reality, we were signing the lease on our own consciousness.

The Miracles and the Trap

Every nation has its grand transition, its historical inflection point. For decades, India’s digital journey was a slow, bureaucratic crawl. We boasted loudly about our gleaming IT hubs in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, but let’s be honest: that was an elite story, a narrative of high-walled tech parks and coding languages spoken by a tiny fraction of the population. The rest of the country watched from the periphery, counting data charges by the megabyte, treating the internet as a strictly metered utility, like water in a brutal drought.

Then came the alignment of forces. It would be a failure of analysis to look at a single corporate entity as a solitary meteor. No, the corporate rollout was the match dropped into a powder keg that had been meticulously packed for years. ‘The state’ had already built the foundational architecture of identity through Aadhaar and transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Market forces had simultaneously flooded the bazaars with remarkably cheap, mass-manufactured hardware from across the border. The infrastructure of scale was ready. When the free data arrived, it acted as the universal solvent, binding state infrastructure, cheap silicon, and over a billion individuals into a single, interconnected neural network.

But when you flood a traditional, deeply religious, and intensely communal society with a sudden, unregulated deluge of hyper-connectivity, the social fabric doesn’t just stretch…it snaps.

Let us look closely at the miracles this solvent produced before we dissect the rot, for a true master of the board always understands the value of the bait. Watch the small-scale vegetable vendor in a tier-2 town casually accept a digital payment via a laminated QR code pinned to his wooden cart. He is suddenly liberated from the ancient, grinding tyranny of loose cash shortages and the extortionate rates of local moneylenders. Watch the daughter of a daily-wage laborer in a remote district sit under a thatched roof, learning advanced data analytics from a free video lecture on a five-inch screen. Consider the small-town creators, the rural folk artists, and the localized storytellers who suddenly found a direct, unmediated line to a global audience, completely bypassing the traditional, high-caste gatekeepers of cultural capital. This was a magnificent triumph of financial and cognitive inclusion. It gave voices to the voiceless and agency to the marginalized.

Yet, a seasoned strategist admires the beauty of a trap precisely because of how magnificent the bait is. Look at how flawless the cage is; who wouldn’t want to step inside? The very tools that democratized access also stripped away the traditional shock absorbers of our civilization.

In Western nations, the consumer internet evolved gradually over three decades. Users transitioned systematically from dial-up text forums to basic personal blogs, from desktop web portals to early social networks, and finally to high-speed mobile feeds. There was time for legal frameworks to expand, time for labor practices to adjust, and time for cultural norms to settle. India, by contrast, skipped the desktop era entirely. A massive portion of our population leaped straight from information scarcity to high-speed algorithmic hyper-saturation.

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously noted that “the medium is the message”: that the structural characteristics of a new technology matter far more than the content it carries because they fundamentally alter the scale, pace, and form of human association. When a society jumps directly into the deep end of behavioral algorithms without intermediate steps, the traditional structures of authority are instantly bypassed. The local elder, the village panchayat, the multi-generational family unit… the historical shock absorbers of Indian life, were rendered obsolete in a matter of months. The youth suddenly possessed a secret, parallel universe that their parents could neither understand, interpret, nor monitor. The moral compass of the past was quietly demagnetized by the sheer, unyielding pull of the digital screen.

The Automated Arena

Which brings us to the core of our problem: morality. We throw that word around as if it were a fixed star in the night sky, permanent and unyielding. But what exactly is a moral crisis? Morality is the unwritten contract that keeps us from tearing each other apart when the police aren’t looking. It is the quiet, organic understanding of right and wrong, shaped by centuries of community, family, and faith. A crisis of morality occurs when the old rules no longer apply, but no new rules have been written to replace them. It happens when the tools we use outpace the philosophy we possess to govern them. Sociologist William Ogburn called this “cultural lag”: the painful period where non-material culture struggles to adapt to rapid technological adjustments. We are running twenty-first-century software on an industrial-era moral operating system, and the system is crashing.

Let us leave the abstract theory behind. Walk with me through the headlines of the last few weeks. Not the sanitized versions on the nightly news, but the raw, unfiltered reality of our streets and screens.

Consider the lynchings that erupted across rural and semi-urban India, sparked by nothing more than a forwarded video on a messaging app. Strangers arriving in a village, completely misidentified as child lifters by a viral rumor, chased down and beaten to death by a crowd of ordinary citizens. Think about those men who held the sticks and threw the stones. An hour prior, they were peaceful farmers, shopkeepers, and loving fathers. What happened to their morality?

The digital space completely removed the face-to-face feedback that normally restrains human cruelty. When you insult or threaten someone in a crowded physical marketplace, you see the pain or terror in their eyes. You hear the sharp intake of breath from the bystanders. Your own biological systems register the immediate physical tension, and your evolutionary wiring flags it as a dangerous, high-stakes conflict. But when you type a vicious comment or forward a terrifying rumor on a screen, there is no biological feedback loop. You hit “send” and are immediately rewarded with likes, replies, and social validation. The suffering of the person on the receiving end is completely invisible. We have built an architecture that amplifies our worst impulses while completely insulating us from the emotional consequences of those impulses. This is the true crisis: the automation of malice and the sterilization of empathy.

Or look at our youth. Think of the young college students in our major metros trapped in the dark web of deepfake extortion. A regular, innocent photograph lifted from a public social media profile, manipulated by a free, easily accessible artificial intelligence tool into something explicit, and weaponized to destroy a life. We have seen bright, ambitious young minds driven to tragic suicides because their digital reputation was compromised by anonymous actors hiding behind disposable accounts and anonymous screens. The moral cost of a human life has been reduced to the ease of a software click.

Look closely at the crowded “IT cells,” where young men are recruited, poorly paid, politically incentivised, or ideologically mobilised to sit before monitors, manufacturing synthetic outrage, doctoring videos, and systematically dehumanizing anyone who questions the party line. They don’t see it as lying; they see it as “engagement.” They do not perceive the moral weight of destroying a reputation because the victim is merely an avatar, a profile picture, a collection of distant pixels.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued extensively that digital platforms accelerate tribalism and corrode the shared trust on which democratic life depends. The algorithms of our social media platforms are engineered to reward this exact behavior. Outrage sells. Fear sticks. Polarizing a neighborhood gets infinitely more clicks than uniting it.

The Symbiotic Cage

To understand the political implications of this automated arena, we must look directly at the generation that inherited this digital wilderness: the Indian Youth. They are a demographic marvel - hundreds of millions of individuals under the age of thirty, full of burning, hyper-visible aspiration, yet balancing precariously on a tightrope of severe economic and structural uncertainty.

The digital age promised them absolute liberation. It gave them instant access to global trends, online education, and a global voice. But it also handed them the volatile “Online Disinhibition Effect”, a psychological phenomenon where the anonymity and physical distance of the internet lower traditional behavioral barriers. For many young Indians, especially in socially conservative settings, physical life remains tightly bound by intense, centuries-old social hierarchies: strict deference to elders, rigid caste dynamics, religious expectations, and the heavy burden of family honor. But online? Online, those ancient barriers dissolve completely. Behind an anonymous handle or a generic profile picture, the deeply repressed frustrations of an entire generation find a volatile, explosive outlet.

This has given rise to a structural landscape of performative morality. Go on any social media platform today and watch the young elites and the working-class youth alike participate in these digital rituals. Online platforms often reward the appearance of moral participation more efficiently than the slow, invisible labour of civic action. They post trending hashtags, change their profile pictures in solidarity, and hurl vitriol at ideological opponents simply to prove their own moral purity to their peer group. At its worst, it becomes an illusion of action: a carefully curated performance that enhances social status while demanding little material commitment in the real world.

Beneath this loud, performative righteousness lies a profound irony: the loneliness epidemic. The Indian youth are hyper-connected but deeply, structurally alienated. They have thousands of digital followers but absolutely no one to talk to when the screen goes dark. The organic networks of the village square, the joint family, and the local neighborhood have been rapidly replaced by the transactional architecture of the feed. And a lonely mind is a profoundly fragile mind, exceptionally vulnerable to radicalization, manipulation, and despair.

Consider the structural trap this generation finds itself in. They look at their screens and see a world of hyper-luxury, global travel, and instant success, curated by influencers who seem no different from themselves. Yet, when they look away from the screen, they face the harsh realities of hyper-competitive exams, stagnant job markets, and immense familial pressure. The gap between digital aspiration and physical reality is vast and deeply painful. The smartphone becomes both the source of their agony and their only escape from it. They retreat further into the digital world, seeking validation through likes and views because the real world offers them so little agency. In doing so, they become easy prey for demagogues and corporations who know exactly how to turn that deep frustration into profitable outrage.

This brings us to the grand masters of this board: Indian Politics. Politics has always been about the careful management of illusions. But the digital age has given politicians the ultimate, unparalleled tool for engineering reality itself. In the old days, a politician had to travel out to a remote village, stand on a creaking wooden stage, and look the electorate directly in the eye. There was a physical accountability, a tangible human presence to the performance.

Today, a political narrative is precision-targeted with surgical accuracy. We have entered the era of what Shoshana Zuboff terms “Surveillance Capitalism”. An economic order where human experience is claimed as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Every bias, fear, insecurity, and preference of the Indian voter is harvested, packaged, and analyzed. If you are a young man deeply worried about unemployment, the algorithm knows it before you even speak it aloud. And it will serve you a highly specific video explaining exactly which minority group or political enemy is responsible for stealing your future.

We have entered a true post-truth era in Indian governance. Objective facts have not disappeared, but they no longer circulate within a universally trusted system of verification. If a government department releases economic data that is unfavorable, a brilliant counter-narrative is instantly manufactured and deployed by digital armies. Deepfakes of political leaders saying things they never said, or endorsing radical positions they fiercely oppose, circulate unchecked through millions of smartphones every hour. Trust. The foundational, unwritten moral contract of our republic is being systematically dismantled day by day. When every fact can be dismissed as partisan fabrication, power belongs not to the one with the best arguments or the most noble policies, but to the one who controls the infrastructure of distribution.

Look at how political campaigning has fundamentally changed. It is no longer about publishing a manifesto or debating policy on public forums. It is about narrative dominance. The modern political party functions like a media network, producing thousands of pieces of content daily, tailored to the specific anxieties of different sub-castes, regions, and age groups. They don’t need to convince you; they just need to flood the information ecosystem so completely that you lose the capacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood. The moral restraint that once prevented leaders from exploiting raw communal hatred has been abandoned. Why? Because political strategists have repeatedly learned that communal polarisation can consolidate votes and displace more difficult questions of governance.

And yet, the same networks have exposed abuse, organised relief, documented injustice, and allowed citizens to challenge institutions that once controlled the public record. But this emancipatory potential exists inside infrastructures whose incentives still privilege speed, spectacle, and emotional intensity over verification.

Are there solutions?

The well-meaning academics will tell you about “Ethics by Design”. The noble idea that tech companies should build human rights and moral safeguards directly into their source code. They will talk endlessly about robust digital literacy programs in schools to teach children critical thinking over emotional reaction. They will passionately advocate for strict data protection laws to prevent our private lives from being sold to the highest bidder in the market.

But let us be completely honest and pragmatic with ourselves. Who honestly has the incentive to implement these fixes?

Do the tech platforms truly want to stop the outrage? Outrage is exactly what keeps your eyes glued to the screen, and those collective eyeballs are worth billions of dollars on the global stock exchange. Do the political parties genuinely want an informed, calm, and critically thinking electorate? A calm electorate asks exceedingly difficult questions about public services, healthcare, infrastructure, and economic policy; an outraged electorate simply votes out of raw, primal fear.

We are left in a deeply ambiguous, unsettling state. The digital age has given us unprecedented, god-like power, but it has completely hollowed out the very moral structures that taught us how to use power wisely. We sit alone in the dark, illuminated only by the cold glow of our smartphones, scrolling restlessly through an endless feed of manufactured anger, performative righteousness, and beautiful, convenient lies.

The free lunch we all so eagerly lined up for in 2016 was never actually free. We paid for it with our privacy, our institutional trust, and our collective sanity. But do not look for a solitary villain in the boardrooms or the halls of Parliament. Look instead at the symbiotic trap we have co-created. We are witnessing a form of digital Stockholm syndrome. The system holds us captive, fracturing our society and draining our attention, yet we fiercely defend it because it offers convenience, connection, visibility, and validation. Platform economics require our attention, the political class requires our fear, and our own psychology craves recognition. The gates to our prison are wide open, the screens are glowing, and we have fallen head over heels in love with our captors.

The question is no longer whether we can break out of the cage. It is why we would ever choose to leave it.

With a poetic heart and a clueless mind, here I am on a mission to write my heart out.

Reading and writing have always been my passions. Something that was lost during the college days and almost forgotten. But then, rekindled by some unforgettable experiences.

Fueled by emotions, this is my journey to reinvent myself.

You have given me hope

You have given me lies,

You have given me smiles,

And brought tears to my eyes.

You both lost my soul and saved it, you see...

Thank you for breathing life into the writer in me.