India, Jan. 1 -- Did anything end yesterday, the 31st of December? Has anything begun today, the 1st of January, that is new, different? Nothing, except the calendar and the diary. Come tomorrow, and the New Year wishes, and the even more cliched replies, will be as stale as the remnants of tea at the bottom of an unwashed mug. Years come and go. Generations, likewise. They come and go with some changes for the worse that are bemoaned and others for the better that we must celebrate. For instance, the human race now lives longer than earlier generations did. We eat more and better and faster than our grandparents did, if not more wisely. Unlike the world of our ancestors, ours is staggeringly connected today, webbed through cables under the sea and invisible waves in the air that make time and space immaterial. And we can draw satisfaction from the fact that it has been 80 long years since the last World War that killed 85 million humans. Eighty long years, too, since the atom bomb fell over two cities in Japan - the first and, as of now, the last time, killing over a 100,000 in one flash and several thousand more in its slow and agonising aftermath. All those torments are behind us. But is ours a more peaceful world? As 2026 opens its eyes on this world of ours, it may well groan to see it is not peaceful at all. And how this race, so startling in its dare, is so petty, mean, and vicious at its core - hating, massacring, laying territories to waste. No less than the butchers of the Crusades did, and as all wars over the centuries have done; only, more craftily, playing with doomed prey before digging in its fangs. We are either cats with their paws and jaws bouncing their catch or we are their miserable victims turning rapidly into their victuals. Be it Hamas or Israel in Gaza, Russia or Ukraine, the US pitting its power against its chosen adversaries, bombs throb in their conveyer vessels waiting for the command of their masters. Robert Oppenheimer's invoking of the Bhagavad Gita's grim words, "I am become Death," has never echoed reality as sharply as it does today. Then, there are weapons around that are too subtle to be seen, either chemical or biological or altogether invisible with voltages that can be unleashed by equally invisible cyber powers or artificial intelligence. The human head has never been inside the reptile's jaw as it is now; yet it seems not to know this. Narrowing the focus to India, we should be proud that we are better protected from our adversaries, stronger in our infrastructure and in our economy than we were. But when it comes to real life issues we must ask: Has the miserable institution of dowry, demanded and extorted, gone? Are domestic violence and honour killings not a horrible reality, hitting us in the face, anymore? And let us accept the fact that rapes often accompanied by murder or attempts to murder remain a shame for India. The costs of marriage, illness, and employment insecurity continue to immiserate India. The phenomenon of internal migration is the saga of a deep malaise in our life. Add to this the body blow on farming dealt by the climate crisis. There is more to be troubled about. The relentless manoeuvres of terrorist organisations claiming to be in defence of Islam and the current horrors against minorities in Bangladesh have imperilled communal harmony in India. Polarisation is at its peak, intensified by bigoted bodies that recall the bloody months of 1946 and 1947. I said at the start of this essay that nothing changes with the coming of a new year and I hold to that. But let me end by saying that some things have changed in India in recent years, and seem set to get entrenched in this new year. Of these, five major ones are the erosion of public faith in the trustworthiness of politicians, their probity and sincerity; the weakening of public discourse on national affairs due to intellectual inertia and fear of reprisal; the growth of violence increasingly directed at whistle blowers, media persons and activists; the drowning of historical verities in the cacophony of deliberate distortion and partisan propaganda; and the replacement of substance by spectacle, decency by deceit and honesty by histrionics. Will we be able to reverse this decline? To be frank, I see no signs that say we will. But then I cannot believe that the democratic temper of our Republic which has seen Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, C Rajagopalachari, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jayaprakash Narayan, EMS Namboodiripad, CN Annadurai, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee helm our national life, will succumb to the malevolence around us. And at the end of the day, as a people who are good and true and somewhere in our being, shrewd too, we will not be fooled into prolonged amnesia. Three permanent strengths will keep us safe: Gandhi's truth, the Taj Mahal's beauty, and our electoral democracy's verve. The first, saluting ahimsaic love unto the last human being; the second, symbolising our secular ethic and aesthetic; and the third, sustaining our faith in our Constitution's stunning and unique sense of fairness....