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.

At dawn in a village in Maharashtra’s Satara district, beneath an ancient banyan, ASHA worker Sangeeta opens her blue kit. Sunlight spills across the sugarcane fields as she speaks softly to a circle of women, some cradling infants, others asking questions they dare not voice before their husbands. With patience and compassion, she explains how spacing births can save lives. In this simple morning ritual lies the true story of India’s population revolution: not in files or slogans, but in trust, dignity, and the quiet empowerment of women.

Delhi’s brutal winter suddenly felt a degree warmer as Vladimir Putin’s aircraft touched down and the capital basked in the diplomatic glow of a ‘Putin Yatra’. The Russian leader’s 2025 visit did more than thaw the December chill; it reignited one of the world’s most durable partnerships and signalled India’s return to the global centre stage with striking self-assurance.