The wedding didn't begin at the marriage hall in Chennai. It began hundreds of kilometres away, on railway platforms across India.

Who keeps watch on the watchdog? That uncomfortable question hangs over modern journalism like a dark cloud. The profession that once challenged kings, exposed scams and rattled governments is itself standing in the dock. The watchdog has not merely stopped barking. In many places, it has learned to wag its tail.

​The country is wrestling with big problems: inflation, unemployment, pollution and failing infrastructure. Yet a controversy sparked by Madhurima, a Class 9 art textbook, has opened a fresh debate about education, history and culture.

June has come and gone. The calendar has turned another page, but the fields remain parched.

India has witnessed several shocking cases of alleged medical negligence that ended in preventable deaths.

History suggests that revolutions are not born merely from poverty. They emerge when rising aspirations collide with unmet expectations. Political thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, James C Davies, and Samuel P Huntington argued that societies become volatile when people's hopes grow faster than a system's ability to satisfy them. India's freedom movement, as well as the mass protests of the 1960s and 1970s, reflected this dynamic.