Imagine if India had never adopted its family planning program, today our population would be between 2.5 to 3 billion. The pressure on land, water, and food resources would have been catastrophic. Agricultural expansion is already limited, while water resources are projected to shrink by nearly 50 per cent by 2030. Such a scenario would have led to widespread hunger, mass migration, and chaos.

The political temperature is soaring — slogans fill the air, enthusiasm has gripped the streets, and hearts are aflame. From Patna to Purnea, one question echoes everywhere — “Who this time?

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'?