Karnataka today resembles a feudal court. At the breakfast table, the Chief Minister and his deputy are not quarrelling over idli–vada but over the throne, a slow-motion knife fight, while the Congress high command in Delhi watches nervously from the corridors, hesitating like a modern-day Dhritarashtra...

Recently, speaking at the Nagpur Book Festival on November 29, RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat challenged a controversial observation in Mahatma Gandhi’s 1909 classic Hind Swaraj—the claim that India emerged as a nation only because of British rule.

On Mirza Ghalib’s birthday, his couplets travel effortlessly across continents, languages, and generations. They are quoted in classrooms, shared on social media, sung in ghazals, and debated by scholars. Yet in Agra, the city where Ghalib was born in 1797, remembrance remains faint, formal, and painfully inadequate.

How many warning bells must ring before New Delhi wakes up? How long will India play the polite bystander while its eastern neighbour slides into the abyss? History has a cruel sense of déjà vu. We have seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.

The bodies are pulled out one by one from twisted metal that, minutes earlier, was a laughing family on holiday. A child’s shoe lies in a blood-smeared aisle. A crushed steering wheel pins a lifeless torso. Skulls crack against seat frames, limbs snap beneath overturned chassis. This is not the exceptional horror of a freak crash; it is the routine forensic reality of India’s fastest roads. On Uttar Pradesh’s expressways, death has become an everyday commuter.

Bangalore Airport, A plumber from Agra clutches a bag of wedding jewellery that will never reach his sister’s hands in Hathras.  Across the terminal, the Ramaswamy family stares at a pile of suitcases and cancelled hotel vouchers. Hundreds of bleary-eyed passengers sleep on newspaper beds. Children wail for milk that never comes. Screens glow blood-red: CANCELLED. DELAYED. CANCELLED.