After the success of his first book, Life Lessons for Managers, R. G. Rajan has produced yet another insightful and useful work in Management Musings. Drawing upon decades of experience in leadership, governance, and the process industry, the author presents a rich collection of reflections on management, ethics, organisational culture, and human behaviour in corporate life.

What makes this book particularly engaging is its practical orientation. Rajan does not confine himself to textbook theories or fashionable jargon. Instead, he shares management wisdom shaped by real-life experiences in boardrooms, public sector enterprises, industry leadership roles, and interactions with people across diverse professional environments. The result is a book that feels authentic, grounded, and highly relatable.

The essays cover a wide spectrum of themes — leadership humility, ethical conduct, governance, emotional intelligence, sustainability, organisational trust, spirituality in management, and the changing role of boards in the digital era. The author repeatedly reminds readers that institutions are ultimately built not merely on systems and processes, but on values, character, and culture.

One of the strengths of Management Musings is its readability. The writing style is simple, conversational, and free from unnecessary complexity, allowing both senior professionals and young managers to connect with the ideas easily. Rajan can distil complex managerial issues into clear and practical insights.

The book is also timely. In an era where organisations are grappling with ESG expectations, digital disruption, governance failures, and increasing stakeholder scrutiny, the reflections offered in this volume acquire greater relevance. Rajan advocates balanced leadership — leadership that combines performance with purpose, authority with humility, and strategy with compassion.

Beyond management principles, the book carries a deeper human message. It encourages introspection and reminds leaders that success is sustainable only when accompanied by integrity, empathy, and social responsibility. In that sense, Management Musings transcends the boundaries of a conventional management book and becomes a guide to thoughtful leadership.

Overall, Management Musings is a valuable addition to contemporary management literature. It reflects the maturity, wisdom, and balanced perspective of an experienced industry leader who has seen management not only as a profession but also as a responsibility towards people and society.

The book will be appreciated by managers, board members, students, academicians, and all those interested in meaningful leadership. Management Musings is available for purchase on Amazon India, Flipkart, and other leading online book platforms.

India’s recently updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), submitted to UNFCCC in April 2026 should be interpreted as a continuation of a carefully sequenced climate strategy developed over more than a decade in line with the global climate strategy. It commits to reducing the emissions intensity of GDP by 47% from 2005 levels by 2035, raising non-fossil sources to about 60% of installed electricity capacity, and creating an additional 3.5–4.0 billion tonnes of CO?-equivalent carbon sink through forests and tree cover by 2035.  These targets build on already early progress—India had 52.57% non-fossil installed power capacity by February 2026, cut emissions intensity 36?tween 2005 and 2020, and created 2.29 billion tonnes of additional carbon sink between 2005 and 2021. Despite hosting nearly 17% of the world’s population, India accounts for less than 4% of cumulative global CO? emissions since 1850, with per-capita emissions significantly lower than the global average, while committing to net-zero by 2070. These outcomes reflect a policy approach in which commitments follow demonstrated implementation capacity.

These include renewable expansion under the National Solar Mission, strengthening transmission infrastructure across states through the Green Energy Corridor programme, storage deployment and planned nuclear scaling. Modelling under Scenarios Towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero by NITI Aayog identifies electricity decarbonisation as the most powerful lever for economy-wide mitigation. Other policy instruments to meet the emission intensity reduction goals include the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, expansion of electric mobility through PM E-DRIVE, production-linked incentives for batteries and solar manufacturing, biofuel blending targets, PM Gati Shakti mission, Dedicated Freight Corridors, and National Green Hydrogen Mission targeting 5 million tonnes annually by 2030. Moreover, the forest-sink target builds on the Green India Mission, Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) funded afforestation, agroforestry expansion and restoration tracked through India State of Forest Reports. Together with Mission LiFE and Long-Term Low-Emission Development Strategy (LT-LEDS), these instruments, India has continued to communicate that India’s climate commitments extend existing implementation pathways rather than relying on headline targets that risk outpacing institutional readiness.[2] These emission intensity targets allow mitigation alongside increasing energy demand, infrastructure expansion and urbanisation in a country where per capita CO₂ emissions remain below the global average, with a clear signal-India’s NDC is designed around national realities and not imported climate templates.

By contrast, sectors like transport and industry present more complex institutional and technological challenges. Decarbonisation in steel, cement and fertilisers depends on emerging technologies such as green hydrogen and carbon capture, whose costs remain higher than conventional alternatives—for example, as estimated in a recent study, the levelized cost of green hydrogen is USD 4.45/Kg, nearly twice that of hydrogen produced from coal and about four times that of hydrogen produced from natural gas[3]—and requires major investments in low-carbon electricity, hydrogen production and transport networks, and infrastructure. In several cases, including hydrogen-based steelmaking, competitiveness is not expected before the mid-2030s. Transport emissions are also projected to rise with urbanisation and logistics expansion, with passenger demand estimated to increase from 7,303 to 26,983 billion passenger-km and freight movement from 2,682 to 20,644 billion tonne-km between 2019–20 and 2050–51, while sectoral GHG emissions could increase more than sixfold over the same period, according to TERI’s Roadmap for India’s Energy Transition in the Transport Sector.

There is also a deeper geopolitical dimension to India’s calibrated approach. Persistent shortfalls in climate finance and technology transfer commitments reinforce concerns that mitigation pathways in industry, transport and energy storage remain capital-intensive without predictable international support. At the same time, India’s engagement with evolving UNFCCC transparency requirements reflects a careful balance between multilateral obligations and domestic priorities. Reporting burdens can divert institutional capacity away from implementation. Recent geopolitical tensions across several regions have further complicated the policy environment for energy transitions. Disruptions in energy markets, trade routes and technology supply chains show that clean-energy deployment depends not only on domestic policy ambition but also on secure access to critical minerals, manufacturing inputs and advanced technologies. Global supply chains for minerals used in solar modules, batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen technologies remain geographically and politically concentrated, creating risks of price volatility and supply disruption.[4]

The more immediate requirement may therefore be sectoral priorities embedded in coordinated policy frameworks rather than sectoral emission caps. This is particularly critical for the transport sector. The Indian transport sector involves multiple ministries and regulatory jurisdictions, requiring strong coordination to support a unified mitigation framework. Responsibilities are divided among the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the Bureau of Energy Efficiency under the Ministry of Power (vehicle standards and fuel-efficiency regulation), the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (fuel supply and blending), the Ministry of Railways (modal electrification), the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (public transport systems), the Ministry of Heavy Industries (electric mobility incentives), and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (green hydrogen deployment), the Ministry of Civil Aviation (sustainable aviation fuels and airport electrification), & the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (green shipping corridors and port electrification).

What we need is a unified mission. The 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change included transport under the National Mission on Sustainable Habitat; however, with multi-fold growth expected in both passenger & freight mobility, we must have a dedicated mission—a National Mission on Sustainable Transport. Earlier, the National Transport Development Policy Committee (NTDPC) highlighted the importance of stronger institutional alignment in transport planning & policy. Recent national sectoral emissions modelling by NITI Aayog provides a timely opportunity to build greater consensus and a shared vision going forward.

In this context, the latest NDC should be seen as a bridge from commitments to coordinated implementation across sectors aligned with India’s development priorities.

Author Details

Shreya Gupta, Research Associate, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). The views expressed are personal and do not reflect those of the author’s organisation.

When Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma was sworn in for a second consecutive term as Assam's CM, the numbers of the new Assembly told a story that went beyond one party's triumph. The BJP-led NDA had stormed back with 102 of 126 seats. The Congress once the dominant force in Assam, was reduced to just 19 seats, two seats short of the 21 required to claim the post of Leader of Opposition (LoP). For the first time since 1977, when the LoP position was institutionally consolidated in Indian Politics, Assam may have no recognised Leader of Opposition. The post will remain vacant, whereas each opposition party will have its own floor leader. There will be no unified voice to coordinate, distribute issues, or hold the government to account within the House. Political observers have responded with alarm, some invoking the language of democratic crisis, others urging calm, but both missing the more uncomfortable truth that this is not primarily what happened to the opposition, but what the opposition did to itself.

Having worked across several assembly cycles in Northeast India, including Assam, have seen opposition coalitions form and collapse with a regularity that would be comic if the consequences weren't serious. The pattern is familiar: parties negotiate seat-sharing late, on terms driven by individual survival rather than collective strategy, and arrive at election day with an alliance that is more a ceasefire than a coalition. The 2026 Assam election was no different. The Congress entered the cycle as the principal opposition force but without a credible plan for the specific areas, such as the Hill Districts, the tea garden belts, or the constituencies where smaller parties hold genuine organisational depth. Seat-sharing discussions with the regional formations like Asom Jatiya Parisha (AJP) and Rijor Dal (RD) produced friction rather than synergy. The result was a fragmented vote, not a consolidated opposition mandate. None of this was structurally inevitable. The BJP's victory in Assam was itself a masterclass in consolidation, bringing together Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) Bodoland People's Front (BPF) into a coherent electoral machine.

Much of the current debate has focused on the constitutional mechanics of the LoP post, what the threshold is, whether Congress allies can be counted, and what happens procedurally when the position falls vacant. These are legitimate questions. But the real question is whether Assam's opposition parties understand why they are where they are, and whether they have the organisational will to change course. An LoP is only as effective as the party behind her or him. In Assemblies where the ruling side holds over 80% of seats, even a formally recognised LoP struggles to reshape legislative outcomes, bills pass, and budgets clear, Committees are dominated by the majority. The LoP's power is largely rhetorical and rhetoric, without organisational muscle outside the House, fades quickly.

What actually disciplines governments in states like Assam is not procedural opposition within the Assembly; it is the threat of electoral consequences. And that threat only materialises when opposition parties do the unglamorous work of building booth-level networks, identifying and fielding credible candidates in winnable constituencies, and sustaining the political energy between election cycles, not just in the months before voting. That work has been largely absent from Assam's principal opposition for a decade.

One of the more persistent strategic errors I have observed in opposition campaign planning for the Asam is the tendency to treat the region as a single political block. Assam contains extraordinary internal diversity, including the Brahmaputra valley, the Barak valley, the hill districts and the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR). Each has distinct grievances, aspirations and political vocabularies. A campaign that speaks to Guwahati does not automatically speak to Diphu or Silchar or Kokrajhar. A narrative about national issues like inflation or corruption may resonate in urban constituencies but fall flat in areas where local identity, development deficits, and land questions dominate. Effective opposition requires not one strategy but several, stitched together under a common frame. The Congress and the opposition more broadly, have struggled to make that stitching work. The BJP by contrast, has been more systematic in deploying targeted welfare schemes, activating cadre networks at the village level, and maintaining the discipline of a party that treats elections as a continuous process rather than a seasonal event.

Opposition politics does not die with the LoP post; outside the Assembly, parties retain the capacity to organise, mobilise, and contest. The question is whether they will use that capacity strategically, or fritter it away in internal blame-shifting. A credible opposition rebuild in Assam would require at a minimum three things. First, honest post-mortem. Not the kind that assigns blame to candidates or local leaders, but the kind that examines structural failures in seat allocation, in candidate selection, in messaging, in the misreading of caste and community arithmetic in key constituencies. Second, investment in sub-regional leadership. Assam's next opposition cycle will not be won from Guwahati; it will be won or lost in the margins of constituencies in the hill districts, the tea belt, and the riverine areas of Lower Assam. Third, a rethink of alliance logic. The current tendency to form defensive alliances to prevent seat wastage needs to give way to offensive alliance-building. Where partners bring genuine additionality in terms of voter bases, ground networks, and social capital. An alliance of parties that are all bleeding votes is not a coalition; it is a mutual decline pact.

The absence of the LoP endangers democratic functioning; it deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed. The LoP's coordinating role within the Assembly is real, and its absence will be felt in the quality of legislative debate, in the scrutiny of executive action, and in the institutional balance that a functioning democracy requires. But democracy in Assam, as elsewhere, is not housed exclusively within the Assembly chambers. It lives in public squares, in civil society organisations, in the press, and in the decisions of millions of voters who will return to the booth in five years with their own assessments of how power was used. The opposition's task in the absence of formal legislative recognition is to build its case in those spaces. To document failures of governance, to articulate alternatives, and to demonstrate that the absence of a LoP does not mean the absence of scrutiny. That is harder than holding the LoP post. It requires discipline, organisation, and patience. It requires treating the next five years not as an interregnum but as a foundation. Whether Assam's opposition parties have the appetite for that work is the question that matters.

On 12^th May 2026, shocking news came up about the NEET 2026 exam cancellation by NTA, which was conducted on 3^rd May 2026. We are all very well aware of the importance of the NEET UG exam, which directly contributes to the healthcare sector of India. This particular exam is conducted every year, and lakhs of students appear with all their dedication and efforts. National Testing Agency (NTA) has been conducting this exam for many years but in recent years have shown incompetence and a lack of responsibility towards organising an exam. Over the past 3 years, many irregularities have been faced by the students, in 2024 the allegations of paper leak emerged from Patna, where candidates reportedly paid 30 lakhs to 50 lakhs to get access to the question paper. In Godhra, the teacher was accused of helping students to fill out the OMR for free and in Sawai Madhopur, “incorrect distribution” of the question paper was witnessed at the centre. And now comes up 2026, where the question paper was leaked in the form of a “guess paper” which consisted of questions that matched nearly 600 marks, and this led to the cancellation of the exam eventually. This cancellation directly affects 22 lakhs students who have given all their blood and sweat to this exam. We have already been witnessing suicide cases of NEET aspirants, which reflect what this exam actually means to them.

What’s the news?

The fact of the latest episode is that around 410 questions were passed on to the students, which consist of the same questions of NEET 2026, which sum up around 600 marks. It was reported that the “guess paper” was circulated on WhatsApp as early as 42 hours before the examination and it contained, according to the Rajasthan Special Operations Group, nearly 120 questions that bore striking similarities to the actual Biology and Chemistry sections of the paper. Nine arrests have been made across five states. A physical copy of the paper was allegedly leaked from a printing press in Nashik. A coaching-linked counsellor in Sikar has been taken into custody. The geography of the scandal, stretching from Rajasthan to Maharashtra to Uttarakhand, is itself an argument against the theory of isolated malpractice.

Claims by NTA or fake promises?

In 2024, the NEET exam was leaked on a very large scale and there was clear evidence of the same. At that time, NTA claimed to put in place stronger reforms. After 2024, NTA introduced multi-stage biometric verification, AI-assisted CCTV surveillance, GPS tracking of question papers, and 5G signal jammers at examination centres. More than 65 Telegram channels were blocked for circulating fake papers. The Radhakrishnan committee submitted wide-ranging recommendations to the Education Ministry, including a transition to online examinations and the reduction of dependence on contractual personnel and third-party service providers. And now the question of the matter is WAS THIS ALL NOT SUFFICIENT? The question that demands an answer is not merely why security failed again, but why the same failure keeps recurring despite repeated pledges of reform.

The Architecture of Failure

The NTA, established in 2017 to professionalise examination delivery, currently relies heavily on contractual staff to manage one of the highest-stakes tests in the country. After 2024, the Radhakrishnan committee was formed to prepare a report on the allegations put on NTA and that report highlighted that NTA is dangerously dependent on third-party vendors like contractual staff, which means that much of the sensitive work, including question processing, translation, and exam centre management, is handled by contractual personnel rather than permanent, accountable government officials. And also, many exams are conducted in private computer labs and schools that lack standardized security protocols, leading to non-functional CCTV cameras and “managed” cheating. When an institution managing the academic futures of 23 lakh students annually has neither a permanently staffed security apparatus nor an independent audit mechanism, it is not a question of whether a breach will occur, but when. The rot, in other words, is architectural.

The human cost behind the headlines

Every year, lakhs of students appear for NEET UG with a dream of becoming a doctor and contributing to the healthcare sector but these discrepancies shatter the dreams of younger minds. A NEET aspirant generally takes 2-3 years for preparation and even in some cases it goes to 5 years, relocate to different cities like Kota, Jaipur, Hyderabad for coaching, shift their life around this exam, and even suffer financially. And now the announcement of NEET cancellation and re-examination has given mental trauma to the students who have already given exams and were scoring well. And now the students have to pay the cost due to this administration’s fault. This injustice falls disproportionately on first-generation learners, students from rural backgrounds, and those without the financial cushion to absorb delays is a dimension of the scandal that rarely receives adequate attention.

What Reform Must Actually Look Like

What India requires now is not another inquiry, but action on the recommendations of the Radhakrishnan panel. The NTA must shift from being an administrative coordinator to a technology-first research body. There should be a reduction in reliance on private outsourcing and the main goal is to man the NTA with internal experts in psychometrics and cybersecurity rather than temporary contractual staff.

The transition to online examinations, which is technically feasible and operationally superior in limiting the physical handling of question papers and must be implemented without further delay.

There should be rigorous implementation of the Public Examinations Act, 2024, which mandates up to 10 years imprisonment and 1 crore rupees fine for organised paper leak syndicates.

The dependence on private printing infrastructure, which has now featured in multiple leak investigations, must end. And the Education Ministry must accept that its role in this crisis is not merely supervisory; it is consequential.  

Is this Bad Luck or Bad Governance?

Three years of irregularities in a single examination, which is the sole gateway to medicine for a nation of 1.4 billion people, is not bad luck. It is bad governance. The difference matters because bad luck passes. Bad governance, unless confronted directly, does not.

The author is a fifth-year law student at the University of Rajasthan, Five-Year Law College, Jaipur. Views expressed are personal. 

Is the year slipping away, or is it we who quietly slip through the year, unnoticed even by ourselves?

There is something pleasantly strange about the time we transition from one year to another. As we move on with the beginning of a new year, the fireworks begin to fade, the city’s festive glow softens back into its gentler lights, the frantic exchange of greetings comes to rest, and calendars are quietly replaced. The world, as always, impatiently begins to move forward. And somewhere along this journey, a distinct feeling anchors within us, sort of a private ritual of turning inward.

It often arrives while opening an old notebook and finding a sentence highlighted or while discovering a forgotten note inside a book. Sometimes, during a late-night scroll through photographs in our phones, when the early months of the year suddenly begin to look so distant, as if they belonged to another life or at least to another version of ourselves. And sometimes it comes simply as an uneasy feeling that time may have moved with greater sincerity than we ourselves managed to.

The promises we made at the beginning of the year – to live with more discipline; to become calmer in speech and less hurried in thought; to return calls on time; to write regularly; to eat better; to practice a craft; to be less distracted, less reactive, less scattered or to be more available to the present moment while inhabiting it – now collectively stand, more like questions, staring right back at us. Perhaps we make these promises because somewhere we already know that a meaningful life is not always destroyed by one great tragedy. More often, it is slowly diminished through habitual inattentiveness.

Why do we even make such promises each year? I guess a strange symbolic energy gets attached to the turning of the calendars. One begins believing, and quite irrationally, that time itself has offered a new alignment. That a different arrangement of dates may somehow produce a different version of the self. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, a Turkish poet, once wrote of “a mind at peace”, not as idleness, but as a condition in which time is felt rightly. Most of us, however, rarely feel time rightly. We count it, schedule it, divide it, lose it, chase it and in the end complain about it, but seldom do we inhabit it. And still, every new year gives us this brief illusion that time has renewed itself simply because the calendar has.

But a “year”, after all, is not really a thing in nature. It is one of humanity’s ways of negotiating with the incomprehensible, assumingly linear flow of time. The Earth completes one orbit around the Sun. Seasons return the same way. From that recurring movement, we create a unit stable enough to organise memory, expectation and administration of our lives. But nothing in existence truly pauses at these anniversaries. Midnight on the 31st of December is largely indistinguishable from midnight on any other day. Nature keeps evolving, and the galaxies continue moving outward in silence, while human beings gather under fireworks, trying for a moment to believe that beginnings can be scheduled.

This is why time has troubled philosophers and physicists with almost equal intensity. Ordinarily, time appears to be a simple linear movement of events. A clock ticks, a day passes, a year ends. But the moment one looks at it closely, it begins to behave less like a road and more like a maze. Newton imagined time as a kind of flow that moves steadily through the universe i.e. it remains the same everywhere, indifferent to planets, stars, sorrow, age or memory. Whether one stood on Earth, Mars or some remote star, time, in that view, moved with perfect impartiality. It was the great background against which everything else happened.

Well then, Einstein, with his theory of relativity, changed our foundational understanding of time as he quietly removed this common background from the universe. In his universe, time was not a fixed backdrop on which events occurred. It was part of the stage itself. It could stretch, slow, bend and behave differently depending on speed and gravity. A clock on a mountain ticks ever so slightly differently from a clock at sea level. A clock in a fast-moving spacecraft is in disagreement with one left behind on Earth. These differences are tiny in ordinary life, but real enough that modern GPS systems must correct for them every day. Without Einstein’s strange insight, even our maps would gradually begin to be false. The unsettling conclusion is that there is no single grand “now” shared equally by the whole universe. What is present for one observer need not be present in exactly the same way for another. The present, which feels to us so obvious and factual, is in fact local, relational and almost very personal.

And then, just when relativity has made time strange enough, quantum physics makes reality even stranger. At the smallest scales, the universe refuses to behave like the neat, obedient world our senses are trained to expect. Particles do not always seem to possess definite properties until measured. Possibility appears to precede actuality. Events become probabilistic rather than certain. Two particles, separated by great distances, can remain connected in ways that defy ordinary intuition. The world, at that depth, does not look like a machine ticking forward. It looks more like a field of possibilities settling into form, which again depends on our observational field.

This has led some physicists to wonder whether time itself may not be as fundamental as it appears. Perhaps time may not truly be a reality, but something that emerges from our perception — like temperature, which feels real enough to us, but is actually the collective behaviour of countless moving particles. In that sense, time may be less like some linear flow and more like a pattern that appears when reality is observed from a certain distance.

Julian Barbour explains this in one of the most striking ways. He suggests that reality may not be a flowing sequence, but rather it may be made up of several complete moments, called “Nows”. Each “Now” is like a still frame, complete in itself. What we experience as the flow of time may simply be consciousness moving, or appearing to move, from one such frame to another, much like a film feels continuous only because still images pass before our eyes in quick succession. Carlo Rovelli also explains this just as beautifully when he says time is not one great universal clock hanging above the universe and ticking equally for everything. For him, time arises from relationships i.e. from change, heat, movement, decay, memory and interaction. In other words, time is not something the universe carries like a property. It is something that becomes visible when things happen to one another.

Strangely, the closer science looks at time, the less it resembles the thing we usually claim to “have”, “waste”, “save” or “lose”. It begins to look less like a possession and more like an experience. And yet, for all this cosmic complexity, human beings encounter time most intimately through memory. We do not feel relativity in equations. We feel it when childhood seems both yesterday and another lifetime. We feel it when a year disappears in routine but one afternoon remains vivid forever. We feel it when a voice, once ordinary, becomes unreachable. Physics may tell us that time bends with gravity, but life teaches us that it also bends with grief, love, waiting and attention.

This realisation is unsettling, but also strangely liberating. Perhaps time does not pass in the way we imagine. Perhaps consciousness moves. Perhaps what we call a year is less an objective container and more a frame through which memory arranges itself.

A shattered glass does not reassemble itself. Childhood cannot be revisited except through memory. Words, once spoken, continue living in consequence even after their sound has vanished. Physics calls this the arrow of time i.e. the movement towards entropy, dispersion and irreversibility. Life, too, has such an arrow. Moments, once lived, cannot be recovered in their original form. That is why years feel so peculiar in hindsight. Memory does not preserve chronology per se; it preserves intensity of emotions and experiences and what we learn from them. Perhaps this is why reflection is about measuring this intensity.

Did we live the year attentively, or merely pass through it? Were we truly present, or mostly elsewhere, rushing toward some future moment which, once reached, dissolved into another anticipation? Perhaps the real tragedy is not that time passes, but that so much of it passes unlived. The mind remains busy preparing for life instead of inhabiting it. This, I think, is where time is most distorted, i.e. not in clocks or calendars, but in consciousness. We are rarely where life is actually happening. One part of us keeps rehearsing the future; another keeps revisiting the past. The present, meanwhile, becomes only a corridor we cross, without ever fully arriving.

Simone Weil, a French philosopher, considered attention not only a mental skill, but also a moral act because to attend to life is to honour it. Just as to attend to another person is to love them without announcing love, and to attend to one’s own conduct is to stop living as an accident.

Thus, nearly every civilisation created pauses for new year, birthdays, festivals, etc within the frames of time, not because time changes at these thresholds, but because human beings require pauses in order to see clearly again. Without pauses, life becomes one continuous movement of reaction and momentum. One unfinished day spills conveniently into another. Responsibilities keep multiplying; notifications replace reflection; fatigue disguises itself as practicality; survival begins presenting itself as wisdom, and slowly, without any dramatic collapse, the mind that once imagined transformation becomes increasingly occupied with management and maintenance. Many of us disappear through this repetition.

Modern life has made this disappearance easier. Every silence now arrives with discomfort. Every idle moment seeks occupation. Solitude barely remains solitude before stimulation intrudes again. One reaches for the phone for a minute and emerges much later carrying nothing memorable except a vague exhaustion. Information accumulates, but little settles into understanding. The mind remains continuously engaged, yet increasingly unable to remain deeply present with anything long enough to be changed by it. This is the problem of fragmented attention. It has been proven that attention is not infinite; it is a limited resource. What we repeatedly attend to shapes neural pathways, strengthens habits and gradually constructs identity. Many studies in behavioural psychology have proven that habits are not sustained by dramatic declarations but by cues, repetitions and rewards. The brain economises effort by automating repeated actions. This is efficient for survival, but dangerous for living. Because once inattentiveness becomes habitual, even one’s own life can start happening in the background.

Thus, resolutions fail so often, not because people are insincere. But because they mistake desire for design. They confuse emotional clarity with conscious behavioural change. A person may genuinely wish to change, but if the old cues remain, the old rewards remain, the old environment remains, and the old identity remains unexamined, the old pattern will keep returning. And that is why the idea of becoming an entirely “new person” every year eventually begins to feel artificial. Human beings do not transform through declarations. The self is not replaced overnight; it is carried forward. We are not erased and rewritten. We are revised incrementally. Nietzsche wrote of this in the idea of “long obedience in the same direction”. We live in a time that celebrates intensity more than continuity. We want the high emotion of beginning, but not always the humbling dignity of continuing. Yet almost everything worthwhile in life is built through long obedience to work, love, friendship, discipline, prayer, craft, public service, and even character.

In the idea of transformation, I find more resonance with palimpsest, which is an old manuscript on which fresh writing appears over earlier writing, while the older marks still remain faintly visible underneath. We are all palimpsests in that sense. New versions of ourselves are written upon the traces of old ones. So real change is recalibration and not reinvention.

In this recalibration, one learns where excess becomes damaging. One begins making cleaner choices. Fewer compulsions and fewer performances. The Greeks had a phrase for this called meden agan, which means nothing in excess. It was a kind of inner balance or homeostasis. Just like nature, we too survive through homeostasis i.e. temperature, pressure, sugar, oxygen, all must be held within limits and harmony. Rivers change course, forests regenerate, seasons rotate, ecosystems correct and collapse and correct again. Life’s balance does not come from a frozen state, but as a continuous intelligent process.

Looking back at the time or year that has gone by, we are greeted not by pride or regret, but with the emotion of humility. Humility, not because everything went according to plan, but for the fact that very little did. Time does not unfold like a design carefully authored by us. It is revealed scene by scene. Sometimes with grace. Sometimes with inconvenience. Sometimes with beauty. Sometimes, with a strange arrangement of people and circumstances that makes sense only later, as if life has its own intelligence and we merely recognise it in time.

Different traditions have given names to this order. The Stoics called it logos, a rational coherence beneath visible disorder, while Indians named it ?ta, the underlying rhythm that holds the world, while the Chinese have the idea of li i.e. an organic pattern, like the grain in wood or the markings in jade. What matters is not the terminology but the recognition that meaning does not always require control.

We know our years are not fair in their distributions. Some of us receive losses without warning, while some are given responsibilities beyond their strength, and some are gifted in such abundance that they themselves cannot fully explain. One must understand that at a given point in time in life, ease and difficulty do not arrive in proportion to virtue, and effort does not always receive reward. Pretending otherwise is denial, and noticing this honestly is clarity, not pessimism. This is what the Buddha taught us – life is not suffering, but it becomes so when we refuse to see life as it is. Life, strangely enough, does not seem to demand perfection from us. It only asks for sincerity.

And perhaps this is where love enters the equation. When one looks back honestly, whatever goodness has endured in life rarely feels entirely like a work of the self. It arrives through others, even though the ego finds difficulty in admitting it. It comes through patience extended by others towards our shortcomings; their forgiveness that does not humiliate; through people who continue recognising possibility in us during phases when we ourselves have temporarily lost faith in us. Some people absorb our rough edges without converting them into accusations. Some remain even when departure would have been easier and perhaps even logical. Some offer acceptance without making it sound like charity. This kind of love works silently, creating the conditions in which one is allowed to grow without fear.

Maybe maturity begins there i.e. in recognising how much of one’s life has depended upon grace one never fully earned. Even those we call enemies, in some strange way, shape our becoming. They reveal our impatience, our pride, our insecurity, our need to be understood, our hunger to win. To love an enemy may sound impractical or preachy. But perhaps it means something simpler, which is to refuse being internally governed by hostility and deny animosity the privilege of shaping our inner life. It is in such a state that the enemy loses his power. And this is freedom.

Each year, each pause brings the temptation of reinvention. New year, new self. New goals, new routines, new declarations. There is nothing wrong with this impulse. It shows that the mind still wishes to rise. Even abandoned resolutions matter because they reveal direction. They show what part of us still wants refinement, however imperfectly. But perhaps the wiser task is not to become someone else. It is to become more aligned with who we are already capable of being.

We must also remember that each person walks a path that appears comparable to another’s only from a distance. Measuring one’s progress against someone else’s milestones is like using another person’s map to navigate an unfamiliar terrain. We will advance in some places and falter in others. We will appear late in one season and unexpectedly prepared in another. This is our own rhythm, and we must rejoice in it. If there is one understanding worth carrying ahead, it is to know that heaviness is not always a burden. Often, it is the weight of something meaningful in the making. And so lightness, when it comes, is not earned by escape, but by endurance. So for each pause, whenever we choose to have it, I pray that we may keep showing up. May we return to our work even after falling short. May we bow quietly after doing well. May we learn to recognise excess before it becomes ruin. May we live less in anticipation and more in attention. And above all, may we live in a way that feels true from within. Because in the end, truth is the only measure that does not fluctuate. It is the only evidence that remains when applause fades, when plans fail, when calendars change and when the noise of the world grows quiet enough for us to finally hear ourselves.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are personal and are intended only as reflections on life, time and human experience. They do not represent the views of any institution, organisation or authority with which the author may be associated.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday called upon schools across India to accelerate the shift to online learning in response to the current global crisis, one institution found itself in a position no other school in the country could claim: it had already been there for six years.

21K School — India's first and Asia's largest online K–12 school, was not built in response to a crisis. It was built in anticipation of a world where geography, circumstance and disruption should never interrupt a child's education. While thousands of schools across India now face the urgent and unfamiliar challenge of moving classrooms online again, 21K School's 78+ country community of learners will wake up every morning as they have every day since June 2020 — to uninterrupted, world-class education.

"We did not go online out of compulsion," said Yeshwaanth Raaj Parasmal, Founder and CEO of 21K School. "We went online because we believed, from day one, that this is the future of education. What we are seeing today is not a surprise to us — it is a validation. Every decision we made, every system we built, every facilitator we trained was in preparation for a world exactly like this one."

Built for the Future World.

When 21K School launched in 2020, at a moment when the rest of the world was scrambling to hold traditional classes over video calls, they made a conscious decision to not digitise an offline school. They built an entirely new kind of institution from the ground up: one with no physical dependency, no geographic limitation and no single point of failure.

Today, that architecture is not just an advantage. It is the difference between continuity and chaos.

21K School operates across three internationally recognised curricula — Cambridge International (registered centre IA702), Pearson Edexcel (registered centre 94883) and Indian boards, serving learners from age 3 to 18 across 78+ countries and 500+ cities. Its 340+ strong global team of facilitators, academic leads and support staff were never office-based, they were all mentored and coached to thrive in a world that they access on their laptop screens. Their classrooms were never buildings and their infrastructure was never vulnerable to what is unfolding today.

What Uninterrupted Learning Looks Like

For 21K School families, today is not a day of panic communications, emergency Zoom links or hastily rescheduled timetables. It is Tuesday.

Learners log in as they always do. Facilitators teach as they always do. Progress is tracked, assessments are conducted and parent updates are shared all within a system designed not as a contingency plan, but as a permanent, professional educational institution.

Small class sizes ensure every child is known by name. Flexible scheduling ensures learning fits the family. Personalised pathways ensure no child falls behind or is held back because of a global event beyond their control.

This is what it means to be built for the future rather than retrofitted for it.

About 21K School

21K School is India's first and Asia's largest online K–12 school, founded in June 2020 by Yeshwaanth Raaj Parasmal. The school serves learners from Nursery through Grade 12 across 78+ countries and 500+ cities, offering Cambridge International, Pearson Edexcel and Indian curricula. With 340+ global team members and a community built on the belief that every child deserves their way to learn, 21K School is the most prepared educational institution in India for a world that demands flexibility, resilience and global access.

#AnotherWay

For media enquiries, interviews and press credentials: karuna.kochar@21kschool.com | www.21kschool.com

Not long ago, social media was mostly about sharing selfies, memes, and weekend plans. Today, it has become one of the most influential arenas for political discussion, community organizing, and social change especially among young people. From India to Bangladesh and beyond, a generation that grew up with smartphones is using these platforms not just to react, but to lead.

In India, where more than two-thirds of the population is under 35, young voices dominate the digital conversation. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and X have turned into primary sources of political news and debate for millions of 18- to 29-year-olds. Many spend hours daily scrolling through reels, live streams, and sharp political commentary. During recent elections, short videos and targeted campaigns on Instagram proved especially effective at reaching first-time voters. Similar trends appear worldwide: young people increasingly turn to social media and video content for political information, often preferring it over traditional news outlets.

When Online Anger Moves Offline

This digital energy has repeatedly spilled into the streets. In 2024, Bangladesh’s student-led protests, largely coordinated through Facebook, WhatsApp, and viral videos, grew from campus grievances into a nationwide movement that ultimately toppled the government. Students shared real-time footage of events, built solidarity across borders, and bypassed state-controlled media.

A year later, in Nepal, a sudden government ban on major social media platforms triggered massive Gen Z protests against corruption and censorship. What began as online outrage quickly escalated into widespread demonstrations, forcing political concessions and highlighting how quickly digital frustration can ignite real-world action.

Similar youth-driven waves have appeared in climate campaigns, anti-corruption drives, and justice movements across continents. Hashtags, live streams, and shareable videos allow ideas to spread faster than ever, enabling young organizers to rally support without traditional hierarchies or big budgets.

The Voting Gap

Yet there’s a striking disconnect. While young people are highly active online debating policies, sharing analysis, and amplifying causes many still hesitate to show up at polling stations. In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, roughly 47% of eligible voters aged 18–29 cast ballots, a figure that felt disappointing to many activists despite being higher than some past cycles. In India, youth registration has risen, but translating digital enthusiasm into consistent offline participation remains an ongoing challenge.

This gap raises an important question: Can “clicktivism” evolve into sustained civic power? Bridging that divide will likely require creative efforts—voter registration drives integrated with social campaigns, community organizing that starts online but ends in local action, and education that shows young people how their voices matter beyond the screen.

New Forms of Leadership

At the same time, social media is nurturing a different kind of leadership. Young influencers, student organizers, and content creators are shaping narratives through relatable videos and personal storytelling. They build communities where peers feel seen and heard, discuss complex issues, and motivate collective action. For many, these platforms offer an accessible entry point into politics that doesn’t require waiting for an invitation from established parties.

Visual content—quick explainers, emotional testimonials, or sharp memes often resonates more deeply with younger audiences than lengthy speeches or newspaper columns. The result is a more decentralized, creative style of civic engagement.

The Double-Edged Sword

Of course, these tools come with serious risks. Algorithms often push users into echo chambers, feeding them content that confirms existing beliefs and intensifying polarization. Misinformation spreads rapidly, and the pressure for virality can reward outrage over nuance. Young people, as heavy users of short-form video, are especially exposed to these dynamics.

Studies suggest that those who supplement social media with established news sources tend to develop stronger civic habits, including higher voting rates. This points to the urgent need for better media literacy teaching critical thinking, source verification, and the ability to spot manipulation amid the constant scroll.

Platform design plays a role, too. Business models built on maximizing engagement sometimes amplify divisive or false content. Addressing this will require cooperation among governments, educators, tech companies, and users themselves.

Looking Ahead

As artificial intelligence and more immersive formats enter the mix, social media’s influence on youth politics will only grow. The potential is enormous: more inclusive debates, faster mobilization, and stronger connections across borders. But realizing that potential depends on how we handle the downsides of misinformation, shallow engagement, and digital divides.

The path forward lies in combining the best of both worlds. Young people already excel at using digital tools to raise awareness and build momentum. The next step is helping them convert that energy into lasting influence at the ballot box, in community work, and in shaping policy.

Social media didn’t create youthful idealism or frustration with the status quo; it simply gave it a powerful megaphone. Whether that leads to deeper democratic renewal or heightened division will depend on the choices we make today about literacy, platform responsibility, and how we turn online voices into real-world change.

The journey from likes to genuine leadership is messy and far from complete. But for a generation that has never known a world without these platforms, it may well define the future of democracy.

By Ambikesh Pandey, PhD Candidate in Decision Sciences at IIM Udaipur,

Ambikesh is currently a PhD candidate in Decision Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, with a research focus on behavioural decision-making processes. As a scholar examining governance, digital participation, and the evolving role of social media in democracy, his work lies at the intersection of governance, information technology, and social media areas that align closely with both his academic interests and civic values. His academic journey is driven by a strong commitment to advancing global development through impactful, interdisciplinary research. Along with this, He is thinking of launching 'YouthPulse,' a platform focused on promoting civic sense and digital democracy among users.

And Rushali Kaul, Social Media Executive (The Bonus, Amar Ujala)

Rushali Kaul is a Social Media Executive at The Bonus, Amar Ujala (Noida, India) and a founding member of the digital initiative, where she play a key role in building and strengthening the brand’s online presence from the ground up. Her specialization in creating and executing data-driven social media strategies that enhance brand visibility, audience engagement, and content performance across major digital platforms.

History reminds us that the British East India Company made its fateful inroads through the soil of Bengal, and it was here that the first seeds of the Indian freedom struggle were sown—from the spark of the Sepoy Mutiny at Barrackpore to the organized revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century. It was this intellectual and radical ferocity that led Bal Gangadhar Tilak to famously remark, "What Bengal thinks today, India will think tomorrow." If Tilak’s axiom holds any residual truth, then the current tremors in the Bengali identity are not merely a regional concern; they are a bellwether for pan-Indian consequences.

I just had a 1,400-kilometre journey along the banks of the Narmada, from its primordial source at Amarkantak to its churning estuary at the Gulf of Khambhat. It is more than a geographic traversal; for a Bengali rooted in West Bengal, it is a clinical audit of the soul. As we drove through the heart of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, our car—adorned with a bilingual banner in Bengali and Hindi—served as a mobile lightning rod for questions of identity. I am neither a devout pilgrim nor a hardened atheist, yet as a physicist accustomed to observing the anomalies that break established models, the experience was a revelation of a systemic collapse.

I was met with perplexing, often uncomfortable interrogations about the state of West Bengal, and tellingly, nearly all of them came from Bengalis—ascetics who had renounced the world in the forests of Central India and expatriates who had built thriving lives far from the Ganga-Padma delta. When I attempted to lean on the "classical" crutches of our political discourse—the perceived step-motherly behaviour of the Centre or the rise of external communal polarisations—the arguments failed to cut much ice. My interlocutors, many living in states where local governments are perennially at odds with New Delhi, pointed out the obvious: these are the constants of Indian federalism. They asked, with a bluntness that only distance affords, why the Bengali alone seems to use these as perennially convenient excuses for a perceptible cultural and intellectual retreat.

This sense of a culture in defensive withdrawal was recently punctuated by the ultimate straw on the camel’s back: a prominent political leader in West Bengal demanding a "loyalty test" for Bengalis. It was a crude, provincial echo of the infamous "Cricket Test" proposed by the British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit in 1990, who suggested that South Asian immigrants were not truly British unless they cheered for England. When a culture begins demanding loyalty tests from its own people, it has transitioned from an expansive, confident civilization into a terrified, gated enclave. It is the ultimate admission of insecurity. We are no longer a culture that attracts; we are a community that suspects its own residents. This provincialism is the absolute antithesis of the universalism of Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, or Kazi Nazrul Islam, yet it is being peddled as a desperate defence of identity. As a physicist, this suggests to me that the "classical model" of Bengali identity has reached its ultraviolet catastrophe—the point where old equations no longer describe the subatomic reality of our crisis.

To understand this collapse, we must look at the "anomalies" that our intellectual class prefers to ignore, specifically the systematic academic sanitisation of our revolutionary history. For decades, an intellectual elite—often comfortably entrenched in Western universities—has popularized the term "Gentleman Terrorists" to describe the Bengali revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. This is a masterstroke of domesticating the radical. By appending "gentleman" to the revolutionary, they strip the fire from the fuse, recasting the bomb-maker as a frustrated Bhadralok or a sociological case study in middle-class angst. They turn the roar of the movement into a polite, localized grievance. This displacement of truth is devastating. While these intellectuals "deconstruct" the Bengali spirit for global consumption, they conveniently omit the sheer, brutal scale of the sacrifice. Look at the records of the Andaman Cellular Jail, the dreaded Kala Pani. Of the political prisoners held in those soul-crushing cells, subjected to the oil mill and the whip, more than 450 were Bengalis. These were not "gentlemen" engaging in a hobby of dissent between cups of tea; they were the steel backbone of a pan-Indian uprising. The British Empire feared them not for their "gentlemanly" conduct, but for their terrifying ability to organize across linguistic and provincial lines. Yet, in our modern curriculum, these 450+ names have been reduced to a footnote, or worse, lumped into a "terrorist" category that modern Bengal is now taught to view with a sterilized, academic distance.

Consider the first random anomaly: Rajendra Nath Lahiri. In the hallowed halls of elite Indian universities, the names Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, and Thakur Roshan Singh are household icons, the "poster boys" of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA). Yet, how many modern Bengalis—those currently obsessed with loyalty tests—even know that the mastermind behind the Dakshineswar bombing and the Kakori Rail Dacoity was a Bengali named Rajen Lahiri? The British Empire was so terrified of Lahiri’s intellect and radicalism that they hanged him in Gonda Jail on December 17, 1927—two full days before his three comrades were sent to the gallows. They feared a rescue attempt; they feared the "Bengali spark" igniting the North. Today, Lahiri is a ghost in his own land. We have traded our revolutionary fire for a manageable, "intellectualized" version of history. We claim the revolution in our poetry, but we bury the men who actually built the bombs.

The second random anomaly is Dhirendranath Datta. Every February 21st, we swell with pride as the United Nations observes International Mother Language Day, a global tribute to the Bengali Language Movement. But we rarely discuss the man who first moved the resolution in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in February 1948 to make Bengali a state language. Datta was a "Bengali Gentleman" in the truest sense—principled, bilingual, and fiercely rooted. Yet, his trajectory—ignored by the power centres of West Bengal and eventually tortured and murdered by the Pakistan Army in 1971—points to a culture that prefers symbols over substance. We celebrate the event because it feeds our vanity, but we have discarded the man because his brand of gritty, constitutional defiance is too demanding for our current era of performative politics. By ignoring men like Lahiri and Datta, we have hollowed out our identity, leaving a vacuum filled by narrow provincialism and "Tebbit-style" loyalty tests.

Like Lord Kelvin at the zenith of the nineteenth century, our political and intellectual class declares that our identity is secure, that these "anomalies" of forgotten heroes and diaspora insecurity are minor "clouds" in an otherwise clear sky. They are wrong. These are not small clouds; they are the signals of a total paradigm collapse. The "classical" Bengali identity, built on nineteenth-century Renaissance nostalgia and mid-twentieth-century rhetoric, can no longer explain or sustain our twenty-first-century reality. It is a model that has failed to account for the kinetic energy of a world that no longer rewards nostalgia.

I call upon the Gen-Z of India in general, and Bengalis in particular, to be the Max Plancks, the Einsteins, and the Heisenbergs of our social fabric. Just as those young physicists did not try to "patch up" Newtonian physics but instead realized it was fundamentally incapable of explaining the subatomic world, the younger generation must realize that the current provincialism of our leaders is a dead end. The old world of "gentlemanly" sanitization and exclusionary tests is collapsing under its own weight. Like the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century, which led to the total collapse of the objective materialist world through the work of Dirac, Schrödinger, and Bohr, we need a paradigm shift in how we perceive ourselves. The anomalies are shouting at us from the banks of the Narmada to the cells of the Andamans. Gen-Z must stop looking at the horizon of the past and start thinking hard about the quantum leap required to remain relevant. The "objective materialist" version of Bengal—defined by borders, loyalty tests, and sanitized history—is over. A new, radical, and universal identity must be born, or we will remain forever haunted by the ghosts of the men we chose to forget.

The war in the Middle East demonstrates the sheer failure of the US in terms of clear strategic planning based on effective cost-benefit analysis before going into it. Hence, it failed in anticipating the likely outcomes. The Trump administration moved by simplistic and sweeping understanding judged the military operation would be a short-lived and surgical one that would push Iran to the precipice of regime change. However, this thinking proved wrong and Iran refused to be Venezuela 2.0.

Led by this overly simplistic assumption, both the US and Israel started the game with a gamble to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hoping for the collapse of the regime. However, this did not force Iran to capitulate. They assassinated the commanders and leaders representing Iran’s political and military strength and tried to destroy the country’s nuclear and military strength as much as they could; still, Iran prevailed. The US and Israel were largely successful in scoring these tactical gains vis-à-vis Iran. But judged by overall strategy, they failed and the US paid a heavy price in each step towards knocking out Iran’s missile and drone launching capabilities as the war drained the US stockpile of updated missiles, arms and ammunition along with financial resources. Meanwhile, the US President Donald Trump was forced to recognise the rising costs of the war and recalibrate the strategy by declaring a pause in strikes and looking for off-ramps.

Iran’s Asymmetric Strategies

Iran was aware of the fact that it could not have a conventional victory against a joint military campaign of the US and Israel, two of the world’s most advanced militaries. Hence, it had been training itself since the Iran-Iraq war 1980-88 in the art of surviving the military offensives and imposing high costs on the adversaries. Its preparation and training stem from the awareness that it faced an existential threat from both the US and Israel since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, quickly followed by the protracted Iran-Iraq war of eight years,  where Iran alone fought against a colossus collective adversary, just like the current war, when Iran is confronting the US, Israel and Gulf states. Then, Iraq was backed by the US and the Soviet Union, which were providing key assistance at the military, intelligence and diplomatic levels and the Gulf states were assisting with financial inflows. While confronting the two superpowers, Iran was cut off from the international military and economic supply chains. As a result, it was necessary to learn the art of cultivating various non-state actors and fostering a shadow economy not only to survive against the adversaries but to impose prohibitive costs on them as well. Against this backdrop, Iran developed a strategy of mine warfare and fought by recruiting irregular fighters as regular channels of moving men and materiel were blocked. The asymmetric war strategies that developed out of expediency were further fine-tuned and became an integral part of Tehran’s regular strategy to maintain forward defence to help it project power in the region while avoiding direct confrontation with great powers. The deaths and destruction that Iran had to put up with during the Iran-Iraq war propelled it to adopt a forward defence strategy. Using various proxy groups simultaneously allowed Iran the leeway to adopt a course of deniability to avoid exposure to any kind of direct war.

Iran’s shadow economy was maintained through “shadow fleet” or “dark fleet” referring to a covert network of hundreds of older, often uninsured tankers that use deceptive tactics to export oil in violation of international sanctions. Under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s (IRGC) institutional control, an expansive military-industrial complex was placed.

The IRGC assiduously built Hezbollah as a massive military force in Lebanon. The American military invasion of Iraq in 2003 helped Iran cultivate Shiite militias who adopted new techniques of asymmetric warfare, including roadside bombing networks, intelligence-driven targeting of US diplomats, commanders other personnel. They also used partner militias to maintain deniability. Civil war in Syria provided a rich theatre of experience for the Iranian-backed proxies since 2011 where they confronted local Islamic radical groups as well as foreign forces. Iran, over the years, developed decentralized logistics network to move fighters and materiel through Iraq and Syria, which is being used in this war as well. The IRGC trained the military personnel as well as proxies in the doctrine of absorbing strikes, dispersing and reconstituting, which has been instrumental not in winning wars but in making the war too costly for the adversaries to reinvigorate.

The Economic and Political Dimensions of Asymmetric War

Iran, over decades, has been cut off from the international financial market and trading system, whereas its assets remain frozen and it is deprived of generating oil revenues through legitimate channels. It has been kept out of the petrodollar system. Hence, it did not see any costs to itself when it sought to hold the global trading and financial system to hostage by blocking the Strait of Hormuz and striking missiles at ports and firms across the Middle East, as it saw little stake in safeguarding the same.

Iran witnessed how the US military bases that were built around the Middle East temporarily to provide security to the Gulf countries in the turbulent region during and following the Gulf War of 1990 were made permanent. The Gulf countries were made to tolerate the military alliance between the US and Israel in return for the American security partnership with them. The US also floated the plan of the Arab-Israeli peace process to alienate Iran. Hence, Iran harboured the desire to demonstrate to the Gulf countries that the US pivot to the region is tethered to and closely aligned with Israel’s interests rather than those of the Gulf countries. In this war, Iran demonstrated how, by initiating the war along with Israel, the US placed the Gulf economy and security in jeopardy. Iran, by attacking the bases, diplomatic and financial centres, with reasonable success in the Gulf region, demonstrated that the US military bases have been built only to provide security to Israel rather than the Gulf countries. Iran sought to raise the political cost of American military operations by generating such a trust deficit in the Gulf.

Iran developed alternative strategies and political willpower to persist and fight back even after the assassination of the top leaders of all branches of military and intelligence wings, along with the decapitation of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, which Tehran had predicted and was prepared for the eventuality. The adversaries expected that it would steer the country towards regime change. However, the attainment of these tactical gains failed to even deter Iran, let alone the collapse of the regime. The US and Israel eventually prolonged the war driven by sunk cost fallacy. Iran, on the other hand, based on its years of experience and awareness of the massive military threat from the US and Israel to its existence, had trained itself in decentralized warfare tactics by empowering military personnel at each level of decision-making and carrying out military operations.

The removal of older generation leaders paved the way for the assumption of leadership by younger generations who are more battle-hardened and ambitious. Iran knows that success for it is just to survive the military onslaught and impose enough costs to prove that it can uphold its sovereignty by dampening the willingness of external powers to fight an expensive and uncertain war.

In the long and complex history of the Indian National Congress, few leaders embody organisational loyalty and grassroots credibility as profoundly as Mallikarjun Kharge. His election as Congress President in October 2022 marked a historic departure from nearly a quarter century of Gandhi family stewardship, making him the first non-Gandhi party chief in 24 years. At a time when the party was confronting electoral setbacks and internal introspection, his elevation signalled both continuity and institutional renewal. Rather than emerging through charisma-driven mobilisation, Kharge rose through decades of disciplined organisational work, reinforcing the Congress tradition of leadership shaped by structure and ideological commitment rather than spectacle.

Born on July 21, 1942, in Warwatti village in present-day Bidar district of Karnataka, Kharge’s early life was marked by social and economic hardship. Educated in Gulbarga (now Kalaburagi), where he completed his graduation and law degree, he first displayed leadership as General Secretary of the Student Union at Government College. As a practicing lawyer, he became closely associated with labour unions, defending workers in industrial disputes and earning the enduring nickname “Solillada Sardar” — the leader who never lost an election. His formal entry into the Congress in 1969 coincided with a transformative phase in Indian politics. In 1972, he was elected to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly from Gurmitkal, beginning a rare record of nine consecutive Assembly victories spanning nearly four decades. Handling key portfolios such as Revenue, Rural Development, Industries, Transport, and Water Resources across successive state governments, Kharge established a reputation for administrative rigour, land reform initiatives, and strengthening Panchayati Raj institutions.

Kharge’s shift to national politics in 2009, after winning the Lok Sabha election from Gulbarga, marked a new phase in his public life. As Union Minister for Labour and Employment, he focused on expanding social security for unorganised workers, strengthening Employees’ State Insurance coverage, and broadening provident fund access. In 2013, as Minister of Railways, he emphasised safety and institutional stability during a challenging period for the ministry. Following the Congress defeat in the 2014 general elections, Kharge was appointed Leader of the Congress Party in the Lok Sabha, becoming one of the principal opposition voices despite limited parliamentary numbers. Later elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2020, he assumed the role of Leader of the Opposition in 2021, where he consistently raised concerns on federalism, institutional autonomy, agrarian distress, and legislative scrutiny, earning cross-party respect for his measured and constitutionally grounded interventions.

Kharge’s election as Congress President in 2022 represented both symbolic and structural significance: a senior Dalit leader ascending to the party’s highest office through an internal electoral process. As president, he has prioritised booth-level restructuring, revival of frontal organisations, opposition coordination, and internal dialogue, while maintaining organisational continuity. His leadership style rests on consensus-building rather than populism, administrative discipline rather than rhetorical flourish. A consistent advocate of social justice, reservation safeguards, and constitutional protections, he has carefully balanced identity representation with institutional responsibility. From the Assembly corridors of Karnataka to the national Parliament and party presidency, Kharge’s five-decade career reflects endurance, discipline, and principled politics. In an era often defined by immediacy and spectacle, his journey stands as a testament to steady organisational work and democratic resilience.

The author is a Congress Grassroots Leader based in Bengaluru

When the last firework fades and the city’s festive glow softens into a gentler light, something else begins, sort of a private ritual of looking inward. As we read this today, the calendar has turned, greetings have been exchanged, and the world appears eager to move forward. Yet for many of us, it is precisely in this pause that reflection finds its place, not as an act of performance or resolution, but as an honest reckoning with what has been lived and what remains to be understood, to be acted upon. Socrates’ reminder that the unexamined life is not worth living may sound severe only until one recognises its profound intent. It is less a judgement than an invitation. An invitation to resist living on the momenta and tides of time. It asks us to pause and notice what shapes and shades our days have taken.

A “year” is less a feature of reality than a measuring convention. It is our way of carving continuous change into a unit that the mind can hold. In astronomy, it is simply an orbital interval that tells about the Earth’s return to a comparable position in its path around the Sun, closely tied to the cycle of seasons. In physics, time itself is not an absolute backdrop; in relativity, it is interwoven with space and depends on the observer’s motion, so even the notion of “the same amount of time” is frame-dependent. What gives time its felt direction, meanwhile, is not the calendar but irreversibility in the physical world, a statistical tendency for entropy to increase, which provides the “arrow of time.” So when we say a year has “ended,” nothing in nature pauses to acknowledge it; the only real shift is informational: we take a long, continuous stream of experience, compress it, compare it, and through that act of analysis, we draw a perspective.

For everyone, I believe, in hindsight, 2025 feels full. Not loud. Not triumphant. Full in the way a river is full - steady, patient, sometimes turbulent, always moving with grace and never seeking validation. There were moments of clarity and moments of confusion, days that moved effortlessly and days that resisted every intention. But what remains is not the inventory of events; it is the manner in which the year was lived, being largely present, less scattered, more engaged than afraid. That itself feels like a wholesome achievement.

We often assume that life’s difficulty lies in what happens to us. Readers of philosophy have long known that it is quite the other way around. Much of our unease arises from our absence—from living too far ahead in anticipation or too far behind in rumination. When a year is lived without drifting ahead of it or falling behind it, when moments are met as they unfold rather than translated into worry or regret, something quieter but more essential becomes visible: the underlying goodness of life itself, often unnoticed because it is ordinary and unannounced. That goodness, I have learned, is rarely an act of the self. It does not arise from discipline alone, nor from any solitary resolve. It arrives through others. Through patience extended by them without sighs, forgiveness that does not demand confession, and the acceptance without trials of our imperfect versions. There were those who absorbed rough edges without turning them into accusations, who stayed present when absence would have been easier. Love of this kind does not declare itself as virtue; it works invisibly, creating the conditions in which one is allowed to grow.

Looking back, humility comes naturally. Not because everything went according to plan we would have authored, but because very little did. The year did not unfold like a design carefully created by us; but it revealed itself more like a script discovered scene by scene. At times, life felt uncannily arranged, as if an unseen intelligence was placing circumstances and people exactly where they needed to be. Sometimes this meant rest. Sometimes comfort. Sometimes it was a stumbling into learning and growing. Different traditions have named this order in different ways. The Stoics spoke of logos, a rational coherence beneath apparent chaos. Indian thought describes ?ta, a sustaining rhythm that holds the world, whether or not we understand it. What matters less than the name is the recognition that meaning does not always require control. There is a quiet relief in accepting that not every outcome must be authored to be worthwhile.

This is not to romanticise the year. It was not fair in all its distributions. Life or its years rarely are. Ease and difficulty do not arrive in equal measure, nor do they obey effort. Pretending otherwise is denial. Yet noticing this imbalance is not cynicism; it is awareness. The Buddha’s insight was not that life is suffering, but that suffering begins when we refuse to see life as it is. Acceptance, in this sense, does not become resignation; rather, it brings clarity without complaint.

Some moments invite revision. Revisiting the words spoken too sharply, silences held too long, reactions that could have been gentler. But time, in its benevolence, does not seem to demand perfection. It asks for honesty of presence. Even the much-invoked law of averages feels less mechanical when viewed this way. It appears not as cold arithmetic, but as life’s inherent tendency toward attaining balance. But this would make sense to someone who wishes to see it this way, for it can be easily missed, just as daylight can be mistaken for darkness by someone who refuses to lift their hand over their eyes.

As the calendar turns again, the language of reinvention becomes irresistibly seductive. New year, new self. Yet psychology tells us that radical reinvention is rarely how human change actually works. The self is not replaced overnight; it is carried forward. Our identities are built as narratives, not resets. They are shaped by continuity more than rupture. What we call a “new beginning” is usually another chapter written by the same hand, with the same habits, values, and emotional grooves still faintly visible beneath the fresh ink. Change, when it lasts, is almost always incremental. Research on habit formation and behaviour change shows that progress comes not from dramatic overhauls but from small, repeated adjustments that respect existing patterns rather than deny them. When we try to become someone entirely new each year, like someone appealing to the moment, we often lose our bearings, severing continuity in the very name of growth. The old patterns then return, not as failures, but as reminders of who we already are.

What can change is texture. Patterns can be softened, refined, redirected. Beliefs can be questioned. Responses can become less reactive, more deliberate. But erasure is rare and perhaps unnecessary. Psychological maturity lies not in abandoning the self, but in integrating it more wisely. The Greeks grasped this intuitively in their ethic of meden agan, which means nothing in excess. Not ambition, which overreaches. Not restraint, which withholds life. Not even reflection, which can harden into rumination. Balance, they understood, is not achieved by reinvention but by proportion, which is the steady calibration of what already exists. However, such a balance cannot be coerced into existence through urgency or control. It emerges slowly, through proportion, repetition, and the discipline of small actions performed without spectacle. Perhaps moving forward does not mean becoming someone else, but becoming more aligned with who one already is. Cleaner choices. Fewer unnecessary engagements. Less noise. More truth, especially with oneself. And while doing this, we must bear in mind that each of us walks a path that appears comparable to that of others, but only from a distance. Measuring our progress against someone else’s milestones is like using another person’s map to navigate an unfamiliar terrain. We will advance in some places and falter in others. This, too, belongs to the rhythm.

If there is one understanding worth carrying into the year ahead, it is this: heaviness is not always a burden. Often, it is the weight of something meaningful. And lightness, when it comes, is not earned by escape, but by endurance. The task, then, is simple, though never easy, to keep showing up. To return to the work after falling short. To bow quietly after doing well. And above all, to live in a way that feels true from the inside, because in the end, that is the only measure that does not fluctuate.