Innholdsfortegnelse for 12 January 2026 i India Today

Rarely does one magazine have the privilege of a ringside seat to witness, over 50 years across two centuries, the journey of a nation. This special issue marks that occasion. We have produced 2,006 issues without a break, and I’ve been the editor-in-chief of the magazine for these five decades. I’ve had the good fortune of having a legion of India’s most talented working for it. When we began on December 15, 1975, initially as a magazine for Indians living abroad, I had promised that we would endeavour to present a “total picture with its dark areas as well as light, of India as it is today, and the potentials which are being realised for what it will become tomorrow”. I am proud to say that we have kept the…

During india today’s first decade, the nation changed without announcing it. The magazine looked beyond power and policy. It watched everyday life. It tracked habits. It paid attention to what people bought, feared, read, watched, and hid. It asked an unfashionable question. What does development actually achieve? Science, it found, stayed urban. Technology skipped villages. Progress moved faster than people could follow. The country was modernising unevenly, and the cost was quiet migration. Consumption arrived not suddenly, but steadily. Televisions entered middle-class homes. Scooters became aspirational goals. Credit followed confidence. india today mapped this consumer boom with numbers, not hype, and showed how a restrained economy was learning to spend. Alongside goods came images. Video cassettes changed leisure. Small towns adopted the medium faster than metros. india today saw video…

How would it have turned out had an assassin not cut short his graph, and had Rajiv Gandhi returned returned to rule in 1991? That question joins the long list of history’s intriguing what-ifs. As we have it, it was fated to remain a flawed apprenticeship in power. Within that, Rajiv Gandhi contained multitudes of contrary qualities. Many see the promise he unlocked in the vast karmic sloth that was India. For them, he was the arch outsider who came in and shook the system out of its inertia. The dynast who, ironically, deepened grassroots democracy with Panchayati Raj, and tended to the basics of life like potable water. And most of all, the fresh-eyed seer of the future. The technophile who, with the telecom mission and computerisation, turned India…

Mandal and Mandir. It’s perhaps no coincidence that they appeared together in history, this double helix on which contemporary India’s political genetic code is inscribed. The old ‘Congress consensus’ had petered out into platitudes; its big tent, which once held all contraries, had collapsed. Around the peripheries of the nation, insurgencies were asserting regional separateness. But these were insurgencies within the main body of the nation—expressing a bristling anger at not being sufficiently accommodated and articulated within the master narratives. Mandal came as the will to freedom from a long social and economic apartheid. The caste elite felt not a little holy terror at the thought of the ‘undeserving’ getting a place at the table and disturbing the fine china. Their young added career anxieties to caste hauteur. The blend…

No single economic policy post-Independence had as foundational and as farreaching an effect as the liberalisation process of 1991. As often happens with major evolutionary breaks, contingency had a greater role than prior design. In 1990, India was staring at a severe balance of payments (BoP) crisis, caused by unsustainable borrowing and high expenditure. Things came to a head during the short-lived Chandra Shekhar government. Now, it’s mostly remembered for the one uninvited distinction it was fated to earn during its four-month tenure: having to mortgage India’s gold as the nation ran out of foreign exchange reserves. For succour, India reached out to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The script from thereon contained a few classic and globally wellrecognised acts of expiation. In June 1991, the Congress came back to…

The time of flourishing was at hand. A faster, richer life beckoned all around: gleaming expressways, digital autobahns, small and big screens lit up by desire, an abundance of choice on supermarket shelves, phone-a-friend at the click of a button. But if the world was now closer, serenity was still far away. On the surface, India’s visage was scarred by conflict, its brow deepened in worry. A roll of the nuclear dice did not abolish the chance of war. Guns rattled on the border and in the heart of the Republic. Like a perverse game of tic tac toe, riots and terror followed every attempt at peace. Chaos and fragmentation appeared to precede order in the polity as governments came in and went out. But in the end, it was…

History would judge Narasimha Rao differently for what he did to the nation, but the Congress as a party atrophied during his reign. It still struggles to shed the diminution of stature it suffered then, as the BJP rose under charismatic leaders like L.K. Advani and A.B. Vajpayee. As Rao left the stage, Sonia Gandhi had not fully emerged from the sphinx-like solitude of 10, Janpath. The one who took the wheel was Sitaram Kesri, an old-style apparatchik who ticked all the boxes for the stereotypical neta: wily, scheming, more comfy in the backroom or on the white gaddas spread out for Congress Working Committee baithaks than out in the sunlight. Such a man became the arbiter of everyone’s fate for two years, and the legacy he left behind still…

IN May 1999, just months after the Lahore Declaration high and talk of dialogue and de-escalation, India and Pakistan were again rattling sabres as it came to light that a great deception had happened—enemy soldiers and militants had crossed the Line of Control (LoC) and occupied positions on the icy Kargil heights that Indian forces had vacated during the previous winter. ‘Operation Badr’, attributed to sections in the Pakistan army leadership, had three objectives—severing key supply routes to Leh and Siachen, internationalising the Kashmir dispute and creating a crisis under the ‘nuclear overhang’ (the two countries had recently conducted N-tests and were officially in possession of nuclear bombs). The intrusions were discovered in May 1999 after local shepherds alerted the Indian forces. Soon enough, the army had amassed some 30,000 troops…

Just before this millennium began, in those heady days when devices and ideas were being advertised into the home of every Indian with a conviction that no sickness is immune to the loving touch of foreign capital, India’s internal security problems marred an otherwise optimistic time. Its seeds had been sown in the last season of frenzy. Right after watching the Babri Masjid domes come down on live TV, the nation had begun a long vigil as senseless violence rattled urban centres—months of rioting in Bombay had climaxed with 12 blasts in early 1993. Then had come a lull. That was broken in Delhi, in 1996, as a blast tore through Lajpat Nagar, claiming 13 lives, and mourned on the nightly news shoulder-toshoulder with Vajpayee’s scramble for the prime ministership.…

Earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis—times when the grim reaper slips through the cracks of even the most rigorous 21st century warning systems—defined the decade between 1995 and 2005, when walls of water slammed Indian coasts, whirls of wind gobbled towns, and subterranean land-shuffling drummed up enough shell-shocked memories to fill a small library with obituaries and doomsday prophecies. The period started off ominously: the ghastliest toll was exacted from India’s neighbour, Nepal, when the remnants of a cyclone reached the Himalayas and caused a snowstorm that trapped hundreds for days. India was to get the big one—off the coast of Odisha—just months before the new millennium. A five-day ordeal whose fatalities are still uncertainly numbered—anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000—it took a while for the displaced millions to get back to that 150…

‘I see myself in public service, not in politics,’ affirmed Dr Manmohan Singh. We were interviewing him in his book-lined study, a sanctuary of sorts for the blue turban-wearing academic-turned-neta. The year was 1999, and the soft-spoken, scholarly Congressman was fighting his first Lok Sabha election in South Delhi against the BJP’s experienced warhorse, Vijay Kumar Malhotra. Not surprisingly, a tentative Dr Singh lost by a sizeable margin. And yet, in a remarkable twist of fortune, just five years later, the ‘accidental’ politician was being sworn in as prime minister. In a sense, 2004 was an ‘accidental’ general election, one where a Congress party, widely written off as a tottering relic in decline, a leftover from a hoary ancien régime, suddenly found itself leading a coalition government. The popular incumbent…

The period between 2005 and 2015 was marked by unsettled power, porous borders and nervous democracies. Terrorism globalised, states weakened from within and leadership across continents was tested by crises. The decade opened with a jolt. The London bombings of July 2005 shattered the assumption that the West’s great capitals were insulated from the violence long familiar to South Asia and the Middle East. The attacks exposed how global jihad had embedded itself within migrant societies and how the ‘war on terror’ was losing coherence even as its threat expanded. South Asia’s western flank darkened. Pakistan, already wobbling under military dominance and fatigue, seemed a state in slow retreat from itself. Fear ruled: suicide bombers, sectarian killers and militant groups acted with ambiguous sanction. PM Nawaz Sharif’s return signalled unresolved…

INDIA TODAY MAGAZINE ON THE WEB ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL THE REMAKING OF INDIA 1975-2025 TO READ THE FULL ISSUE, LOG ON TO: www.indiatoday.in/magazine INDIA TODAY MAGAZINE ON INSTAGRAM KNOW IT AS IT HAPPENS A go-to destination for news breaks and views on politics, sports, films and more @indiatodaymagazine INDIA TODAY DAILY NEWSLETTER INDIA TODAY INSIGHT Sharp analysis on topical issues by the editors of India Today magazine www.indiatoday.in/magazine BEST COLLEGES OF INDIA 2025 INDIA TODAY BEST COLLEGES YOUR CAREER GOLDMINE India Today 2025 Best Colleges Survey — your guide to higher education in the country https://bestcolleges.indiatoday.in/ INDIA TODAY PODCASTS HEALTH IS WEALTH Sonali Acharjee A weekly podcast that promises to get you motivated about your health and well-being https://podcasts.indiatoday.in/health/health-wealth NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH Raj Chengappa A weekly podcast that dissects and…

There can scarcely be a better example of two minds thinking a like than Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. One supplies vision and charisma, the other reinforces it with strategy and execution. Together, they have transformed the Bharatiya Janata Party into the behemoth it is today: the world’s largest political party, claiming a membership of 140 million. Yet size alone has not mattered. Modi-Shah have also instilled a rare work ethic in the organisation. This means unwavering focus on winning elections, be it for the Lok Sabha, a state assembly, or local bodies. Planning begins well in advance, and an entire phalanx dedicated to the task: from central ministers and general secretaries at the apex to panna pramukhs at the grassroots. Every aspect—campaign strategy, candidate selection, booth management—is meticulously calibrated,…

IT was as though the world froze, caught mid-step in a game of ‘Statue’. Travel ceased; offices, classrooms, playgrounds, theat res shut down; entire economies ground to a halt. Holding the world hostage for three years was a tiny, spiky creature—5001,500 times thinner than the human hair, 2,000 times smaller than a dust mote. The novel coronavirus, formally known as SARSCoV2, likely sprung up in the wet markets of Wuhan and travelled the world over, unleashing mayhem and the COVID19 pandemic. India went into lockdown on March 24, 2020, and, in the next few weeks, decided to look its tiny enemy in the eye. Everything—school, office, hotel, stadium—was turned into a COVID ward. The country masked up, the hand sanitiser became an everyday essential, and a whole new vocabulary entered…

“I’m really glad that I could do this for my parents. They did not allow me to realise…but they did go through a lot of financial struggles ”GUKESH DOMMARAJU Youngest world chess champion, at India Today Conclave 2025 For a nation long hypnotised by the crack of willow on leather, the last decade sounded a different note. The first stirrings came in Rio 2016, where a young P.V. Sindhu smashed her way to Olympic silver, then returned from Tokyo (2021) with bronze and a world title in between (2019). Old dogged companions—wrestling and boxing—kept the cadence. On the mat, Sakshi Malik, Bajrang Punia, Ravi Dahiya and Aman Sehrawat extended the tradition forward on the Olympic stage, even as the sport was convulsed by a bitter sexual harassment scandal at home. In…

Over the past decade, INDIA TODAY chronicled a nation accelerating rapidly even as the strain of that pace became increasingly visible. The magazine wrote about bodies breaking early. About pain that no longer waited for old age. About heart attacks arriving without warning. About stress hiding behind gym memberships and weekend getaways. Depression is no longer treated as weakness or indulgence. The gut is no longer about digestion alone either. It is about mood, memory and immunity. Urban diets, processed food and stress are damaging a system Indians were once genetically blessed with. Food has turned from pleasure to strategy. Indians are questioning carbs, sugar, oils and portion sizes with new urgency. Eating right is no longer niche advice. It is a mainstream response to soaring diabetes, obesity and heart disease.…

INDIA TODAY’s first decade is bracketed by tyranny and tragedy, with a lot of tumult in between. It’s a period marked by the personality who ruled the country for nearly sixteen years altogether: a story of triumph and persistence—but also a cautionary tale. And a reminder that no political leader embodies this country’s destiny or controls its narrative indefinitely. The 1975-1985 story is also a tale of resilience. This was a time when India was tested in many ways. Its democratic fabric was uncomfortably stretched both by the Emergency and the farcical Janata coalition that followed. Its humanity questioned in the bloodshed and hatred that overtook the country from Punjab to Assam. Its ability to offer the most basic guarantees of safety to its citizens obscured in the deadly haze…

Mrs Gandhi would not live to see the end of the tempestuous decade that unfolded since her declaration of Emergency in 1975. Yet the close of this chapter bore the stamp of her personality as surely as its beginning. Which is remarkable, given that by March 1977, Mrs G was in a spiral of disgrace and defeat, her party reduced to 154 seats and relegated to the sidelines. Her return from that nadir was a dramatic, Humayun-esque comeback, and similarly destined to end in tragedy. The first step on the long march back came early in July 1977—Mrs Gandhi’s elephant-back ride to show solidarity with the Dalit victims of a caste massacre in Belchi, Bihar. As a photo op, it demonstrated her ability to wrongfoot her opponents. With patience and an…

In the erosion of democratic the decade under review, the world drifted into a harder phase. The Cold War still framed global politics, and its effects were felt through internal upheavals, military takeovers and space in fragile states. India, however, stuck to its traditional non-aligned path in foreign policy and in March 1983 hosted the seventh NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) summit. In Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq emerged not just as a military ruler but as an architect of long-term transformation. Civilian institutions weakened as authority concentrated in uniformed hands. Law, politics and religion were fused into a new governing logic that reshaped society itself. Islamisation altered courts, education and public behaviour, embedding ideology into the state’s functioning. It was a remaking of the republic, one that would outlast Zia’s rule and influence…

The now mythical cricket World Cup win in 1983 casts a mystical light upon us Indians—a classic underdog-takes-the-trophy script we never tire of retelling. There was, though, a special never-say-die spirit about Kapil Dev’s team from the very beginning: the convincing win over the redoubtable defending champions West Indies in the very first match was not just an aberration. From then on, it was a rollercoaster—a heavy loss against Australia, a win against Zimbabwe, a loss against the Windies, an overcoming of Zimbabwe that’s the pedestal for Kapil’s apotheosised 175 not out and a win against Australia. Thence, the famous win against England in the semis and the final slaying of Goliath. The Prudential Cup win is, of course, the meta cricket victory, for everything flowed from it: cricketers became…

INDIA TODAY’S first decade began with the Emergency and ended with an assassination and a massacre. If the law of averages dictated that the mood swing towards lightness and levity in the second decade, that was not to be. History’s fiat still held more in store. But trauma-filled as these years may have been, their churn produced more than poison. To retrofit a popular idiom for India, there are centuries where nothing happens; and there are decades where centuries happen. This was one such decade. The 21st century was invented as a vision. The ‘two Ms’—Mandal and Mandir—modified the very genetic code of Indian polity and society. Then there was the ‘third M’, perhaps even more foundational than the other two. Markets. That’s where we invested our future.…

When history repeats itself, some times tragedy and farce are ladled out in equal proportion across its many instalments. So it certainly seems to be the case with the great Janata experiment—the ‘third way’ in Indian politics that seemed most efficient at losing its way around the multiple roundabouts of Lutyens’ Delhi. The shambolic trial run of 1977-80 was still fresh in everyone’s mind, so the Janata Dal of the late 1980s had in front of it a first-rate manual of what not to do. Yet, the second edition went right ahead and reprinted those bloomers anyway. Within the compressed time-frame he got on the main stage of history, V.P. Singh managed to unleash a social revolution. VP had emerged from within the Congress as the conscientious dissenter on Bofors, the…

No major nation ever writes its history without traumatic passages penned in blood and cordite, but outside of wars, it’s perhaps rare for one decade to contain events of such a cataclysmic nature, that too on such disparate fronts, all of them leaving profound and lingering effects. From assassinations to riots, bomb blasts to social conflagrations, the 1985-95 phase held India in a miasma of dread intense even by its sanguinary standards. Here’s a limited doomscroll: Kanishka bombing, June 23, 1985: A documentary or two and one dark comedy, all in Canada. Besides that, “the world’s deadliest act of aviation terrorism until September 11” has received a lot of amnesia. All 329 people on board were killed when Khalistani terrorists blew apart Air India Flight 182 in mid-air. After a…

The 1987 Bofors gun scam was so big, it took down the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government in the 1989 general election. The scam involved alleged kickbacks by Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors to secure a $1.3 billion deal for 410 howitzers. It was alleged that Bofors paid $18 million in bribes to intermediaries to win the contract, with Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a close associate of the Gandhis, identified as a key conduit. Later on, godman Chandraswami was implicated by the Jain Commission for dubious dealings, including a possible role in the 1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Meanwhile, 1992 saw the Harshad Mehta securities scam, with the stockbroker accused of colluding with bank officials to exploit loopholes in the banking system and siphon off some Rs 5,000 crore. The funds were…

Change was in the air. That became evident in the first weeks of 1985 itself when Mohammed Azharuddin, a wiry 21-year-old from Hyderabad with seemingly elastic wrists, hit three hundreds in his first three Tests—a feat unsurpassed till today). By March, India had announced to the world that 1983 was no ‘fluke’, winning the Benson & Hedges World Championship on a new stage where white balls, colour uniforms, D/N (daynight) matches and new rules prevailed. And by 1987, the cricket world knew where the money was too, with the World Cup moving out of England for the first time, and Reliance coming onboard as sponsor. But for India’s sports fans, it was to be a so-near-yet-so-far kind of year, losing in the WC cricket semis and also getting blanked by…

Two teenagers jabbering away in gaming parlance? Er, not exactly…. This is India. So the honour was reserved for the other end of the age/social spectrum. But fate chose an unlikely duo all the same. It was July 1995 when Jyoti Basu, then a sprightly 84, rang Union telecom minister Sukh Ram, years younger but no spring chicken himself. The Marxist chief minister of West Bengal, sitting in Kolkata and using a Nokia handset on the Modi Telstra network, had just made India’s very first mobile telephone call. The telecom age wasted no time settling in. Within weeks, cellular services were rolled out across the four metros—Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. On August 15, 1995, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) introduced public internet access. Over the next decade, India had…

Great sporting teams are born under a lucky star— old masters and new sparks come together for a few years to make magic on the field of play. It was clear in the mid-’90s that barring Azharuddin just past his zenith, Sachin Tendulkar settling in as a batting great, and Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath as the trusted spin-pace duo, a transfusion of blood was needed. The revelation came in June 1996, at Lord’s—the debut of Sourav Ganguly, one with Gower-ish grace, and Rahul Dravid, blessed with poise and a flawless all-round game. Later that year arrived the other exponent of willowy elasticity—V.V.S. Laxman. In 2000-2001, the last pieces of the jigsaw arrived in the simple explosiveness of Virender Sehwag and the controlled seam bowling of Zaheer Khan. Together, the batsmen…

By the end of the millennium, INDIA TODAY was documenting how social and economic change had begun to shape the most private aspects of Indian life—bodies, homes and relationships. Ageing ceased to be taken for granted. It was monitored, corrected and deferred through clinics, supplements and cosmetic intervention. Beauty parlours gave way to medicalised fixes; surgery lost its stigma. The body became something to be worked on. Male virility, too, came under scrutiny, as stress and performance anxiety followed success into the bedroom. At home, parenting grew anxious and deliberate. Children were assessed early, their intelligence and behaviour tracked. Play turned purposeful; manuals displaced instinct. Love remained, but certainty did not. Money arrived earlier and was spent faster. Call centres reshaped ambition and sleep. Imported goods made aspiration affordable; credit…

In a world changing rapidly around it, India remained an island of relative political and economic calm, anchored by the stability and decisiveness of the Narendra Modi regime. As he and his party grew stronger, so did their capability to take and execute hard decisions. From scrapping Article 370 in Kashmir and launching strikes on Pakistan for its acts of terror on Indian soil, to braving Donald Trump’s punitive 50 per cent trade tariffs, India stood firm. At home, it went after the Maoists, determined to neutralise India’s biggest internal security threat. Modi brought the same resoluteness to the economy, most sensationally—and controversially—with the attempt to curb black money through demonetisation. The Goods and Services Tax was another landmark reform, ambitious in its intent to overhaul India’s indirect tax structure…

The past decade has seen the global order slip from managed instability into a far more volatile landscape, shaped as much by terror and internal collapse as by greatpower rivalry. The political rupture came early with the rise of Donald Trump, whose ‘America First’ worldview hollowed out faith in alliances and multilateralism. His trade war with China—and the spillover of tariff pressure onto America’s own partners—signalled that interdependence could no longer be relied upon as a stabiliser. Violence, however, became the defining grammar of the decade. The Paris terror attacks of 2015 and subsequent strikes across Europe underscored the persistence of transnational jihadist networks even after the territorial defeat of ISIS. Terrorism no longer needed state sponsorship or safe havens; it thrived in fractured societies, online radical ecosystems and weak…

Over the past two decades, power in several states had congealed around entrenched satraps, often stifling the rise of new leaders and hardening factional lines within the BJP. It is to arrest this drift that the Modi–Shah leadership has undertaken a nuanced experiment in political and social engineering—steadily dismantling the era of towering regional strongmen and replacing them with younger, more diverse chief ministers valued less for mass charisma than for organisational discipline, administrative reliability and fidelity to the central command. MOHAN CHARAN MAJHI, 53 Odisha CM since June 2024 A Santhal leader who entered politics as a sarpanch, Majhi’s rise reflects the BJP’s longterm investment in cadre-building and tribal outreach in a state long dominated by the BJD. PUSHKAR SINGH DHAMI, 50 Uttarakhand CM since July 2021 Young, combative…

K. SRINATH REDDY Former Member, Technical Taskforce for Covid-19 ↘ The virus spread not just by droplets, but mostly by aerosols. Use of face masks should have been advised early ↘ Superspreader events should have been avoided. The Delta wave was devastating because the variant travelled with people and celebrated with crowds ↘ Predictions based on linear models were inaccurate, did not anticipate the complexity of virus evolution, health system response and people’s willingness to accept advisories ↘ Whilevaccinesreducedthe severity of illness, the virus could still infect vaccinated persons because the respiratory tract lacked mucosal immunity ↘ ‘Herd immunity’ was a misleading notion: people with acquired immunity in a group only blocked transmission to non-immune persons in that group. Non-immune individuals going to a place with low acquired immunity remain…

When Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla lifted off aboard Axiom-4 on June 25, 2025—becoming only the second Indian to travel to space—he radioed back a line that captured a long-deferred national ambition: “We’re back in space after 41 years…. This is the beginning of India’s human spaceflight.” A day later, Shukla became the first Indian to enter the International Space Station, settling in for 18 days of living and working 400 kilometres above Earth. It was a personal milestone—but also the most visible expression of a transformation that had been reshaping India’s space sector. That shift had gathered decisive momentum in June 2020, when the Narendra Modi government dismantled ISRO’s monopoly over building and launching rockets and satellites. Private players were allowed entry, ISRO facilities were opened to them on payment,…

Could the Badshahs of Bollywood be getting old? That was a question we grappled with, as the three Khans—Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman—turned 50 in 2015. But then if Amitabh Bachchan, 20 years their senior, could still be going strong with Piku in 2015, Pink in 2016 and Kalki 2898 AD in 2024, why not the trio? And so Aamir gave us a Dangal in 2016, SRK double delighted with Pathan and Jawan in 2023, and Salman tripled the excitement with Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), Sultan (2016) and Tiger Zinda Hai (2017). But it wasn’t the Bollywood film that first stormed the Rs 1,000 crore club—that honour went to three films from the South—Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017), KGF: Chapter 2 (2022) and Pushpa 2: The Rule (2024), besides the hugely popular RRR…

Narasimha Rao knew 17 languages, but he didn’t speak much. That was the trait that got him the job. Sonia Gandhi was traumatised by husband Rajiv’s assassination and, a recluse herself, not initiated into the family vocation of her marital home. Taking over a minority government in stormy times was not an option. Someone who had never raised his voice as a cabinet minister under Indira and Rajiv—the classic, khadi-clad Congress amanuensis—seemed a safe choice. At worst, he would do nothing. Initially, that forecast seemed accurate, and everything about this septuagenarian from Andhra Pradesh began bothering Delhi’s power-watchers. As the first prime minister from South India, Rao anyway appeared foreign to those used to noisy bazookas from the Gangetic backyard. They couldn’t decipher his gnomic silences, and they read…

In the intervening decade of 1985-1995, South Asia’s immediate neighbourhood was among the most volatile. Pakistan and Sri Lanka were in flux, one under a dictatorship, the other ravaged by an internecine war over a Tamil homeland. In Lanka, an India-brokered peace between the government and the V. Prabhakaran-led Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) collapsed and we were dragged into the conflict, eventually paying a heavy price for the interference, both with the lives of our soldiers and of a former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In Pakistan, the unexpected death of dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash in 1988 led to another democracy reset, with Benazir Bhutto now in the high chair. Further northwest, the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah government in 1992 ushered in factional warfare among…

IT wasn’t the best of times at the movies, not by any stretch. The year 1985 kicked off with a monster hit, RK’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili, and one will be hard-pressed to find any memory from that one except for cat-eyed Mandakini’s wet sari turn under a waterfall. Takeaways from the period bring three things to mind—grand romance, family dramas and the stirrings of a new K-K-K boy clan priming to take over Bollywood’s reins. The Bollywood royalty Khans, Aamir (Qayamat se Qayamat Tak or QSQT) and Salman (Maine Pyar Kiya), were the first to break ground, with Delhi lad Shah Rukh taking his time to get to Baazigar via Deewana. High romance was in vogue and all three had big hits with titles like Hum Aapke Hain Koun…

Between 1985 and 1995, India stopped being coy. Well, mostly. Habits entrenched over decades, perhaps centuries, cannot really be shed like yesterday’s socks. But a new insouciance, a capacity for questioning the old self, a willingness to look outward for comparisons, those set in. india today followed that shift closely. If the 1980s ended with doubt, anxiety and opacity, the 1990s replaced it with full transparency—a surfeit of visual stimuli. If institutions were to be tested, or beliefs unsettled, it would henceforth be beamed live. Minds take a lot more time to open than even India’s notoriously iron-clad markets, but the way to do it was via the tangible. The body became a project. Aerobics entered living rooms. The Indian middle class began sculpting itself. Health was now as aspirational as…

Taking 1995-2005 at face value, it may appear as if a capricious higher power was in charge—dealing out a dizzying series of ultra-fast sleights of hand. Narasimha Rao was still there as things began, but facing the exit door and, after him, came six more prime ministerial swearing-ins, featuring four faces: H.D. Deve Gowda, I.K. Gujral, A.B. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. The Rao regime wasn’t exactly the paragon of rock-solid stability, being a minority government taunted by no-trust motions, but it was canny enough to survive for five years. Net net, that meant India was still used to a certain inertia of rest in New Delhi. But this decade is when the law of averages caught up. Vajpayee had the first stab at it. Ayodhya had given the BJP quite…

From the streets of Karachi to the mountains of Afghanistan, and from Washington’s power corridors to the streets of Iraq, it was a decade of upheaval that created tremors in the global order and redefined security concerns. The South Asian neighbourhood was already on edge. Pakistan struggled to hold itself together, as ethnic violence engulfed the country’s commercial heart Karachi, while Sri Lanka’s civil war revealed another brutal face of insurgency. To the northwest, Afghanistan descended into chaos after the Soviet exit. Factional fighting destroyed cities, uprooted populations and paved the way for the Taliban’s rise. Meanwhile, in 1998, America was aggrieved over more mundane matters: the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal had consumed Washington. As the century turned, Russia was shedding its post-Soviet gloom. The Cold War was over, but…

Astrange duality tugged at the heart of new India. Modernity flooded the landscape, but deep within there lurked an atavistic ghost. The irrational made frequent visitations, most dramatically when Ganesha idols were said to be drinking milk all over the land one fine morning in 1995. Bizarre apparitions kept popping up across the decade. Y2K led to some millenarian doomsday fantasies. In 2001, the ‘Monkey Man’ menaced Delhizens: the police even released a sketch! Four years later, the Onion Witch stalked not just the capital but places as far afield as central India. The kindly lady, who was said to appear at the front door and make cut onions bleed, was honoured with a horror flick some years later.…

Even though his feted match with Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1995 atop New York’s World Trade Center was a loss, Lightning Kid Vishwanathan Anand more than proved his mettle 11 years later when he became only the fourth player in history to cross the 2800 Elo mark. If 1995-2005 was the decade of Sourav Ganguly’s elite ensemble taking India up a grade or two as a team in world cricket, it was also one where individual sports finally got their moment in the sun—tennis, chess, weightlifting, athletics, shooting, each championed with aplomb on and beyond the national stage after decades of private gestation and self-doubt. ANAND BECAME THE FIRST SPORTSPERSON TO RECEIVE THE PADMA VIBHUSHAN, INDIA’S SECOND-HIGHEST CIVILIAN HONOUR, IN 2007 Fans remember well the moment when Leander Paes…

In this decade, India travelled through sharp contrasts—ambition and drift, empowerment and disillusionment. The early UPA years combined high economic growth with an unprecedented rights-based turn, turning welfare into legal entitlements through RTI, MGNREGA, Aadhaar and food security. Rising global confidence, corporate expansion and sporting triumphs fed a sense of arrival. That momentum was jolted by the 2008 global financial crisis, which abruptly ended the boom. Repeated terror attacks and Maoist violence exposed deep security failures. From 2010 onwards, a succession of high-profile corruption cases hollowed out trust, paralysed governance and triggered mass protest, culminating in the rise of AAP from the streets. Public outrage over crimes against women led to tougher laws, but justice lagged social change. The decade closed not in collapse but exhaustion. The electorate set the…

The period saw India endure what can only be described as a prolonged season of terror. It was not a single war with a single enemy, but a grinding, multi-front assault that struck cities, markets, trains, hotels and forests with ruthless regularity. It tested the resilience of the Indian state and exposed the limits of its security imagination. On October 29, 2005, serial bomb blasts ripped through Delhi’s crowded markets in Paharganj and Sarojini Nagar and inside a DTC bus, killing more than 60 people just days before Diwali. Less than a year later came the Mumbai train bombings of July 11, 2006. Seven coordinated explosions tore through first-class compartments of suburban trains during the evening rush hour, killing 187 commuters. The investigation later revealed a meticulously planned operation involving…

TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS AFTER KAPIL’S TEAM HAD STUNNED THE WORLD, DHONI’S SIDE DELIVERED A VICTORY THAT FELT BOTH HISTORIC AND INEVITABLE It was a decade in which Indian sport experienced a rare convergence of triumph and turbulence. Victories lifted national confidence, individual athletes rewrote gendered and cultural expectations, and cricket reinvented itself as a global entertainment industry. At the same time, scandal, corruption and excess revealed the cost of rapid commercialisation. The high point came in April 2011, when India lifted the ICC Cricket World Cup at the Wankhede Stadium. Twenty-eight years after Kapil Dev’s team had stunned the world, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s side delivered a victory that felt both historic and inevitable. Dhoni’s calm leadership, the emergence of a new core of players and a home crowd’s emotional crescendo turned…

Between 2005 and 2015, India accelerated. Money moved faster. The mall replaced the market. Buying reassured people that they belonged to the moment. By the early 2010s, that confidence faltered. Spending slowed. Aspirations hit a wall. Reality television turned anonymity into a brief career. Wealth demanded spectacle. Celebration became performance. Money also found darker playgrounds. Gambling moved indoors and upscale. The wired generation slept less. Work followed people home. Mobile applications promised solutions for everything—love, fitness, discipline, distraction. Roads became killing fields. Art chased money. Morality grew theatrical. Kisses sparked cases. Obesity rose with affluence. Men chased sculpted masculinity. Breasts were reshaped. Waists were cut down. Sex moved online and onto screens. Porn became portable. There was a silent economy driven by money, loneliness, and the fetish of status. Adolescents…

The more the Hindutva arc widened, the deeper the anxiety aro und identity—of caste, class, community—grew. And every so often, their fury would burst, demanding justice or a fair share. The Dalit was wooed for his vote, but deep inside India’s interiors, his lived reality remained much the same—from the institutional neglect that led to the suicide of research scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad in January 2016 to the public flogging of a Dalit family in Una, Gujarat, the same year. So when the Supreme Court in 2018 passed an order widely seen as diluting the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Dalit anger exploded, forcing the government to reverse the SC ruling. Pushback to state excess unfolded even on the JNU campus in February 2016, when…