The year that has just taken its bow from the stage of history did not so much end as exhaust itself. Like a verbose dinner guest who has monopolised the conversation, it leaves behind a roomful of listeners unsure whether to applaud, argue, or simply ask for a glass of water.
It was, in the Roman sense, an annus inquietus—a restless year—marked less by cataclysm than by accumulation: of anxieties, accelerations, apprehensions, and acronyms. A year in which the world learned, yet again, that modernity does not abolish uncertainty; it merely digitises it.
A World Order, Fraying at the Edges
The much-invoked “rules-based international order” continued its long flirtation with irrelevance. Conflicts lingered without conclusion, peace talks without peace, and ceasefires without cease. Diplomacy became an exercise in strategic equivocation, where clarity was avoided lest it offend someone important.
Globalisation, once sold as destiny, now arrived with footnotes, caveats, and protectionist instincts. Nations preached interdependence while stockpiling self-interest. Multilateral institutions convened with impressive punctuality and modest effectiveness.
The orchestra played on; the conductor looked uncertain.
What distinguished this year was not the novelty of its crises, but their simultaneity. Never before have war rooms, climate models, financial markets, and algorithmic dashboards competed so insistently for the same political attention. Leaders were forced to govern across time horizons—responding to today’s emergencies while planning for transformations whose consequences will be felt decades hence. The difficulty lay not in choosing priorities, but in acknowledging that everything had become a priority at once. This compression of crises has quietly redefined leadership itself: from decisive action in isolated moments to sustained competence under permanent pressure.
Democracy: Still Standing, Slightly Breathless
Democracy, that perpetually demanding contraption, survived another year of stress-testing. Elections were frequent, fractious, and fiercely contested. Participation was high, enthusiasm uneven, civility optional.
Citizens voted not merely for leaders, but against abstractions—inequality, invisibility, indifference. The ballot retained its sanctity; trust, alas, proved more perishable.
What emerged was not a rejection of democracy, but a reminder that it is not self-sustaining. Like a republic in Cicero’s time or a constitution in ours, it requires constant tending—and an electorate that feels heard.
The Machines Grow Clever
Meanwhile, the machines began to think—at least convincingly enough to unsettle us.
Artificial intelligence slipped quietly into daily life, performing feats that once required human judgement, imagination, or at least coffee breaks. It wrote essays, composed music, diagnosed ailments, and occasionally hallucinated with great confidence.
The debate was not about whether AI would change the world—it already had—but about whether the world had any coherent plan for living with the change. Innovation galloped; regulation strolled thoughtfully behind, reading a policy paper.
Prometheus, it seems, has been reborn—with better branding.
The Climate’s Stern Reminder
If technology whispered, the climate shouted.
This was the year when weather abandoned predictability. Heatwaves scorched patience, floods submerged denial, and seasons behaved like unreliable narrators. Climate change ceased to be an academic argument and became an administrative headache.
Governments discovered, belatedly, that nature does not respond to press releases.
India: Learning to Carry Its Weight
In this unsettled world, India stood neither aloof nor alarmed.
Economic resilience persisted despite global headwinds. Infrastructure advanced with visible ambition. India’s diplomatic voice acquired a new assurance—articulating the concerns of the Global South, navigating great-power rivalries with studied balance, and championing digital public goods with missionary zeal and technocratic competence.
India was no longer content to be the world’s promising future. It began, cautiously but confidently, to behave like a consequential present.
Yet triumphalism would be premature. Growth figures sparkled; employment anxieties lingered. Development surged ahead; distribution ambled behind. Demography promised dividends, but only if educated, skilled, and productively engaged.
India’s challenge is not scale—it has mastered that—but coherence.
What the Year Taught Us (Without Resolving Anything)
The year leaves us with lessons, not conclusions.
That stability is fragile, progress reversible, and governance inseparable from trust. That technology without ethics is efficiency without wisdom. That growth without equity courts resentment. That climate change is not waiting for consensus.
For India, the lesson is sterner and more hopeful: that this is a moment not for chest-thumping, but for statecraft; not for slogans, but for institutions; not for haste, but for endurance.
History may not remember this year for a single decisive event. It may remember it as an interregnum—a moment when the old certainties expired and the new ones were not yet fully born.
To borrow from Gramsci, the old is dying, the new cannot yet be born—and in this interregnum, a great many morbid symptoms appeared.
The year did not give us answers.
But it refined the questions.
And for any civilisation still capable of self-reflection, that may yet prove to be progress.
History may not recall this year for a single thunderclap moment. It may remember it instead as the uneasy pause between eras, when the old certainties quietly expired and the new ones had yet to find their voice. The year did not resolve our dilemmas; it refined them. And in a world too often seduced by easy answers, the sharpening of questions may yet be the most civilized form of progress.
