As 2018 approaches, many people are considering ways to improve themselves via New Year’s resolutions.

  As 2018 approaches, many people are considering ways to improve themselves via New Year’s resolutions.

After the deaths of David Bowie, Prince and actor Alan Rickman in 2016, grieving fans flocked to public comment threads on social media to pay their respects in what has been likened to a virtual wake. But many also arrived to find a toxic space where so-called “grief police” mocked them for lamenting the loss of a stranger, chastised them for emotional rubber-necking or even dissed the dead.

After the deaths of David Bowie, Prince and actor Alan Rickman in 2016, grieving fans flocked to public comment threads on social media to pay their respects in what has been likened to a virtual wake. But many also arrived to find a toxic space where so-called “grief police” mocked them for lamenting the loss of a stranger, chastised them for emotional rubber-necking or even dissed the dead.

“Work is worship but laughter is life. Anyone who takes life too seriously must prepare himself for a miserable existence. Anyone who greets joys and sorrows with equal facility can really get the best of life.”

Sir John Strachey, a British Indian civil servant used to address his civil servants-in-training by saying, "The first and most important thing to learn about India is that there is not and never was an India." Historian David Ludden in his book Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India writes 'the territory that we use to describe the landscape of Indian civilization was defined politically by the British Empire. India was never what it is today in a geographical, demographic or cultural sense, before 1947.' Many like Winston Churchill had predicted that post independence, India would disintegrate and fall back into the Middle Ages.