This is the season of holidays and selfies. Friends send photos from Varkala with the sea behind them, or Munnar wrapped in mist. Look closer. The place is present, but barely. What dominates the frame is a face: sharp, centred, filling the image. Everything else fades into a blur.

This is not vanity. It is how we have trained ourselves to see: the individual in focus, everything else slipping into irrelevance. And this habit has quietly travelled from our phones into the way Kerala covers and consumes news.

We increasingly focus on individuals while events dissolve into the background. Institutions disappear. Systems fade from view. What remains sharp is the face: the personality, the celebrity, the accused, the villain of the moment. The person becomes the story, while the conditions that produced the story remain indistinct and largely unexamined.

Consider the actress assault case. Seven men were convicted for a crime that shocked Kerala – not in some remote corner, but in Kochi, Kerala’s own metropolitan centre. The verdict should have forced difficult conversations across institutions: cinema, policing, media, and society itself.

How did such culture of impunity take root? What conditions enabled the crime? What failed so completely that violence........

© Mathrubhumi English