What happens when an alleged gang rape of a minor girl in a park turns, within minutes, from a demand for justice into a competition of rhymes?

​The cockroaches now crawling across India’s political landscape deserve close scrutiny. These self-appointed tribunes of ‘simmering discontent’ appear to have no clear programme or principles: only noise, invective and an appetite for disruption. Calling themselves the Cockroach Janta Party, they claim to speak for an outraged public. Critics, however, see them as a proxy for an opposition unable to defeat the Modi government at the ballot box.

A son shoots his mother on Mother’s Day. Two brothers become sworn enemies over a narrow strip of farmland. An old woman spends her final years abandoned in the corner of a city flat, unwanted and unheard. A young corporate employee, crushed by loneliness, attempts suicide. These are not scenes from a dark television crime series. They are fragments of modern India’s unsettling social reality.

What happens to a society when the newspaper no longer lands with authority at the doorstep, and the television no longer commands silence in the living room?

The enchanting beauty of Braj Mandal, the Yamuna riverbanks, shaded groves, wandering peacocks, gentle cows, and the divine tales of Krishna have echoed for centuries through countless bhajans and folk songs. Devotional classics like “Shyam Teri Bansi Pukare”, “Radhe Radhe Barsane Wali”, “Maiya Mori” and “Jai Radha Madhav” still paint Vrindavan, Barsana, and Gokul as a spiritual paradise. Surdas's and Raskhan's verses remain soaked in the fragrance of Braj’s natural splendour.

What's for dinner tonight? It is the most ordinary question in homes everywhere. Sometimes it's asked with affection, sometimes with impatience, and sometimes it becomes the last question anyone ever hears.