Backstory: 2025 Was a Year of Shifting Shapes and Shaping Shifts |
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Every year comes dyed in the colours of the words that marked it – words tossed out in conversations, in speeches, in literature, in court verdicts, in policy statements, on sports fields, in media narratives. Gathering them is a fraught business, many important words get left out, but here goes…
The year 2025 marks the completion of a quarter of the 21st century. It was a year when time passed sometimes so slowly that you could hear its steady pulse and sometimes so rapidly as if the world was heading for a catatonic seizure. It was a year that had lexicographers desperately search for the word that would best sum it up. Could it be slop, the liquidy mess piped in through the internet which inundated our minds, as the Merriam-Webster people suggest; or rage-bait, online content that causes us to froth in the mouth, as proffered by the Oxford dictionary nerds? Both words are apt, but neither reflected the crassness, careless cruelty and fascist impunity that marked the year. According to the Chinese, this was the Year of the Snake. But snakes could well display greater compassion than did humans this year.
Gaza remained the Ground Zero of human barbarism, continuing to demonstrate to the world how savagery is a foreign policy goal for genocidal states like Israel. Here humanitarian aid came laced with murder; ceasefire translated as ceaseless fire. To this day Gazans live in fear of bombardments and its babies wake up shivering with fright, in fact the largest cause of child deaths this year was Israel. And in Sudan, again, we saw again how babies were paying the ultimate price of warfare.
Palestinian Mohammed al-Jabri, 58, warms himself next to the fire as he sits on the rubble of a building destroyed during the Israeli air and ground operations in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, in Gaza City, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.
Savagery bloomed like a lotus in the world’s oldest democracy as well. Lynchings of Muslims and Muslim-seeming migrants came to be normalised across the country, from “progressive” Kerala and Karnataka to Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. On Christmas Day, even as the prime minister attended Christmas mass in the capital, Sangh Parivar troopers were out terrorising Christian worshippers on grounds that they were proselytising Hindus. So normalised has lynching become that neighbouring, turmoil-ridden Bangladesh picked up the habit of killing hapless minorities, in this case Hindus like Dipu Chandra Das and Amrit Mondal.
Popular cinema was honed into instruments of anti-Muslim hatred. While Chhava, which drew on the Maratha resistance to Aurangzeb (who else?) stoked riots in Nagpur, Dhurandhar, a stylishly made spy thriller packed with unsavoury characters bearing Muslim and Pakistani identities, set the box-office on fire in December, with world-wide collections touching Rs 1006.7 crore! But such a story line is bound to sell in a year that saw the brutal, unconscionable massacre of 26 people who only wanted an enjoyable holiday in a beautiful meadow in Pahalgam. It was perpetrated allegedly by the Pakistan-based terrorist group ,The Resistance Front’ (TRF) and led to Operation Sindoor, which could be considered the fifth major war between India and Pakistan. The Indian television media donned military fatigues, figuratively speaking, making the most incredulous claims. Karachi harbour, is burning, they screamed. This surfeit of prime time patriotism prompted a young soldier to post his plans to enjoy “Icecream in Lahore”. But the disaffected within the country continued to strike back through terrorist acts as the Red Fort blast indicated.
Hate spewed out of not just cinema auditoriums, but in election rallies and within courts. A 71-year-old lawyer weighed down by the animus he bore towards a Dalit Chief Justice of India for supposedly ‘disrespecting’ the sanatan dharma, felt emboldened to hurl a shoe at him inside his court room. Electioneering turned toxic, not for the first time, whether during the Delhi polls in the beginning of the year or the........