A Whirlwind of a Month Called January

All the views expressed in this blogpost are entirely personal. Most importantly, I don't have political affiliations as I'm an engineering student and the post is not meant for any political reasons, but rather it's intended for a little introspection in the first month of the year.

The first post of the year. 31st January is a pretty uncanny date to write the first blogpost of the year. I've been wanting to write something for the whole month but I've been deterring it until the end of the month to realize how everything pans out.

Let me start on 31st December, 2025. A New Year Banquet celebration was organized at the university and I reckon standing in the queue with two of my good friends. We were talking to bide the time and it sure did take us about an hour and a half to even reach the counter. While talking we were expressing optimistic hopes for the new year to come but the new year sure had a dampening effect on that.

Let's begin with five days into the year when the president of Venezuela, a sovereign nation was kidnapped into the USA. I have a tendency to look into underrated places and I am grateful to have had some school friends who had a thing for maps and uncanny places. For anybody who had been following Venezuelan developments would know the state of the country's economy and their record inflation. American and Venezuelan relations have been on the rocks for quite some time but kidnapping a president made no sense given the current American administration's track record. The next day at class we were all having heated discussion about the incident without realizing what the month had in store.

Moving from South America to the middle east we chance upon Iran. The country had been rocked by protests until the massive crackdown and the internet blackout. The true figures are disputable but its perhaps one of the most horrendous things to happen. I've liked Iranian novels and I've even watched some Iranian films but the shear brutality and monstrosity with which people have been targeted for just speaking out to demand basic rights is unthinkable. What puzzled me more was that a grand chunk of the world who are vocal about a lot of issues stayed silent on this matter. Is selective outrage the need of the hour or shouldn't we be outrageous about everything wrong which happens? We're all human beings and our scientific name is a constant irrespective of our religion, race or nationality. The opacity is shocking and seriously disheartening as the world's supposed to come together in this globalized era but we seem to be more divided than ever.

Iran is something personal for me as when I was in school, I had an Iranian friend who was around four years my junior. I remembered the kid and his wisdom which I didn't expect any middle schooler to come up with. When I read about the crackdown, I remembered how in 2022, he was describing the Mahsa Amini protests. I also remember him saying that people do not represent the Iranian regime and that people are non-religious including him who didn't bother about religion. One incident with him stayed etched in my mind. We had an exhibition in school sometime around the end of 2022 and his exhibit had been damaged the day before. I reckon going to the room where the exhibits were displayed and he told me he was bullied but then he said it doesn't matter as he showed up on the day of the exhibition and quickly conjured up a chart. He told me resilience is something Iranians learn as children as situations always turn unpredictable. That was plenty of wisdom coming from a twelve year old. Thinking of nice people like him and his family just increases the melancholy which I feel for Iran.

As if a presidential kidnapping and a violent crackdown of protests wasn't enough to make headlines for a month, we were met with the entire fiasco of Greenland wherein a certain person who wanted to take it over muddled it with Iceland though they are miles apart and certainly not the same. Moreover, who would have ever thought that a president wearing aviators at the World Economic Forum would have ever grabbed the headlines instead of some of the important speeches made out there. Since, traversing the world incidents have brought us to Europe, another thing which sort of paralyzed a part of me was seeing Ukraine's energy sector being pummeled and temperatures dropping to as low as -22 deg Celsius. The resilience and spirit of Ukrainians is truly one of the most inspiring things the world has ever seen. The other day, I was talking with my Ukrainian language teacher online and she mentioned that if she wasn't in Ukraine at the moment, she wouldn't have believed power cuts to be a norm. A part of me felt really heavy that what on earth is going on? It contradicts the entire concept of a unified twenty first century and rather has started to resemble some other dark historic periods.

This is a painting which I had made on the Mariupol Drama Theatre in Dec, 2022 to show depict the dichotomy of Christmas a year back and the present. I think this is symbolic for this article today as warmongering isn't a trait of the civilized world and that its high time for barbarism to end.

Finally, just as I thought around twenty days into month, that opening the news wouldn't bring any more shockers, Minneapolis came into the picture. It's become sort of hard to imagine that a country built on the premise of equality and freedom has tumbled down so badly. Minneapolis had been in the news after Renee Good's shooting but as gun violence has a commonality in America, I didn't think much about it though I had seen videos and everything. What shocked me was the killing of nurse Alex Pretti or an innocent kid being sent to a prison for being an immigrant. I remember in school, we had to learn a little bit about the American and French constitutions as our Indian constitution is based on some of their articles. Something makes me feel sure that perhaps, the American constitution didn't really envisage Minneapolis this way.

Just as the month comes to a close, on the home front in India, came the UGC Guidelines. I haven't read it completely and I haven't got any opinions on it but as a young person, I honestly don't get the point of bringing in caste into university related issues. Its something our generation doesn't care about. We don't see caste, race or religion while making friends but rather look at the other person's interests and our shared common ground which could be our favourite rock bands, movies, anime, books and career development amongst so many other things. Calling a spade a spade is something which we should do, so guidelines which sow divide aren't something which is called for or which is deemed necessary at the moment.

As if the month had more surprises planned for the sane mind, yesterday, my friend showed me the video of the Mira Bhayandar flyover in Mumbai and being engineering students we are stunned as it sort of defies every logic we've learned so far. We're capable of building impressive structures such as the Atal Setu which is again in Mumbai so what on earth went wrong. As engineering students we have been roasting the flyover but it does raise plenty of questions.

Finally, when I thought that there wouldn't be any more news last night, my phone buzzed with a notification from a news website. Out of anxiety to check my email for an internship update, I found that it was a notification telling the Epstein files were out. That was some relief and I hope the victims get justice, though that seems far fetched at the given juncture. This morning as the day dawned, I thought there wouldn't be any more updates only to find a video from an independent journalist in the US who was hiding in a theatre as nobody had turned up to see, the documentary on their first-lady. Who would be to blame for such as sparse turnout as the world could do without documentaries about wives of billionaires and rather we could have worthwhile documentaries on Americans who had a positive impact on the world such as Amelia Earhart or Ray Dolby for that matter.

Perhaps the only positive spin on things this month could be the EU-India FTA which seemed to the be the only flicker of good news amidst all this huge barrage of information.

To wind up, January has been a whirlwind but amidst this barrage of information, something has been creeping up and that's climate change. It's effects are felt all over the world and our weather patterns are getting erratic but surprisingly, as we discuss and debate a multitude of issues and often divide and polarize ourselves into various factions and tend to reside in an information bubble, do we even think of the frailty of human lives? Climate change impacts all of us and a climate catastrophe isn't going to weigh in our economic background, religion, race, nationality or political affiliation. In the twenty-first century, which is the age of the internet, a time when ignorance can easily be tarnished as information is readily available. To the contrary however, we have spiraled deeper into our rabbit holes, but doesn't climate action call for collectivism? Isn't it high time we acknowledge that we're all just plain simple Homo Sapiens and utilize technology for something productive and not destructive? These are questions which linger in my mind the first month to the year draws to a close.