Student uprisings once shook Nepal, Bangladesh, and, decades earlier, Egypt. Governments toppled, but democracy never quite found its footing. Why then does democracy endure in India and the United States, while faltering elsewhere? The answer lies in one word… diversity.

Suppose one were to judge the Narendra Modi government solely on statistics, data, and comparative rankings. In that case, the past eleven years might easily be hailed as a golden era in India’s development. No other political system in millennia has offered such a large population hope, support, and opportunity for mainstream inclusion, and not just that.

She stood in the courtroom, not with questions in her eyes but with a quiet fire burning in them. Her ‘crime’? Choosing to live with the man she loved. For society, she was ‘immoral’; for herself, she was nothing less than a freedom fighter. With trembling defiance, she asked: “Must love carry a certificate to be legitimate?”

In the summer of 2011, a small news item in a Bangalore daily caught my attention. It said the world’s only Sanskrit daily, ‘Sudharma’, published from Mysuru, was on the verge of closure due to financial difficulties. I was intrigued. How could anyone dare to publish a daily newspaper in a language often dismissed as 'dead'?

“Boys and girls together? Arre baba, there will only be trouble!”—the grandmothers, the aunties, and the WhatsApp uncles of India chant this like a holy mantra. For them, co-education is the gateway drug to doom: a ticket from ‘innocent schooling’ straight into the moral ICU.

For over a month now, Karnataka has simmered under the weight of an explosive rumour: a whistleblower alleged that hundreds of women and girls were sexually assaulted and murdered, their bodies secretly buried around the sacred Manjunath temple in Dharmasthala. The accusation electrified the state. Overnight, a revered shrine became the alleged backdrop of unspeakable crimes.