India, June 13 -- "All the lonely people, where do they... belong," The Beatles asked, in Eleanor Rigby (1966).

Well, the answers are changing. They now involve chatty robots, carpool cabs, loneliness ministers and neighbourhood-wide brunches.

See how citizens, communities, governments and researchers are working to bring people back together.

Seoul connection: South Korea

"Just about anyone is vulnerable to social isolation in South Korea," says Kim Seonga, a policy researcher at the government-run think-tank Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

This is a country so plagued by this condition that an estimated 500,000 people aged 19 to 34 years were found to suffer from extreme social withdrawal, according to a 2023 survey ...