Another Year Ends: The Wounds Remain

The sickle of time has completed yet another arc. A year stands behind us, bruised and breathless, while another waits ahead, polished with hope and ritual. Yuletide arrives with its familiar cargo – resolutions, promises, and ambitious checklists – but beneath the surface, life appears stubbornly unchanged. Calendars flip and the world limps on.

Looking back at 2025, one finds not milestones so much as scars. Death, with a capital D, strode across continents, unashamed and uninterrupted. It wore many uniforms, spoke many languages, and justified itself in the rhetoric of peace and security. The vocabulary was noble; the outcomes were not.

From the rubble of Palestine to the frozen trenches of Ukraine, warfare continued to masquerade as necessity. Cities were reduced to headlines, and lives to statistics. Children learned the geography of shelters before they learned the alphabet. Each side claimed righteousness; each funeral proved the futility. Peace conferences were announced with fanfare, even as the bombs refused to read the agenda.

The tragedy of 2025 saw geopolitical tensions – Gaza, Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas. In fact they became normalized. Screens flickered with images of destruction between advertisements and celebrity gossip. Horror became habitual. Condemnations grew shorter. Silence grew longer.

India, too, ended the year in a mood of uneasy questioning. The world’s largest democracy found itself wrestling not with a single crisis, but with a chorus of disquiet. Allegations of ‘vote chori’ echoed through streets and social media timelines, casting long shadows over faith in electoral processes. The debate around SIR – identity, surveillance, and citizenship – opened deeper anxieties about who counts and who decides. These were not abstract arguments; they cut directly into the everyday trust between citizen and state.

Economically, the signs were no less troubling. The rupee slipped, almost apologetically, against stronger currencies, while prices at home showed no such modesty. For millions of young Indians, degrees became heavier and opportunities lighter. Growth figures were announced, but they failed to translate into relief on the ground. For many, survival replaced aspiration.

Daily life, too, carried its own symbols of disorder. The operational mess involving IndiGo left passengers stranded, anxious, and angry.  Airports turned into waiting halls of frustration, mirroring a larger sense of drift.

The national capital, Delhi, continued to struggle with deteriorating air quality and once again disappeared under a toxic shroud. On the roads, danger arrived without warning. Reports of buses catching fire – suddenly, inexplicably – surfaced from different parts of the country. Commutes turned into close calls, and routine travel acquired an undertone of fear. Umrah pilgrims from Hyderabad lost their lives in a horrific accident in Saudi Arabia, their journey of faith ending in wreckage and grief. Is anything truly safe? That was the simple question.

Yet India in 2025 was not a land devoid of light. Amid the noise of politics and the strain of economics, there were moments that reminded people of collective joy – rare, unifying, and almost innocent. None was more unexpected than the wave of Messi mania.
When Lionel Messi’s name rippled through Indian cities, it carried with it something purer than fandom. Children in remote towns mimicked his left foot on dusty fields; adults who had little time for sport suddenly found themselves debating goals and jerseys. Football, briefly, became a shared language that cut across class, creed, and ideology. In a fractured year, it offered a reminder of what simple happiness feels like.

Globally, 2025 also exposed the contradictions of progress. Artificial intelligence grew smarter, but empathy did not keep pace. Climate warnings grew louder, while political will remained selectively deaf. Refugees increased in number, borders increased in rigidity. The world spoke endlessly of connectivity, even as loneliness became a quiet epidemic.

And still, people lived. They married, mourned, laughed, and worked. They adjusted to smaller dreams when larger ones felt unsafe. They argued on screens and prayed in silence. Perhaps that is the real story of the year: not the headlines of power, but the endurance of ordinary lives beneath them.

As the year closes, there is little appetite for hollow optimism. Hope, if it is to survive, must be sober and stubborn. It must come from insisting on accountability, from refusing to forget victims once the news cycle moves on, from choosing participation over apathy. Another year is about to begin. The hoopla will return, as it always does. But if 2025 has taught us anything, it is this: time does not heal by itself. It only gives us the chance, again and again, to do better, or to repeat the same mistakes with a newer calendar.

The arc has completed a circle. Whether it becomes a spiral upward or a loop of despair depends not on the year ahead, but on what we choose to remember from the one just gone.

Anyway, cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.