Why Virat Kohli Rules!

In the churning news cycles of 2017, some new stars were born, others dimmed, but Captain India’s Burned the Brightest of All

- Raj Chengappa

A nation, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. When it has a billion-plus people, as India does, any vacuum caused—by leaders or louts, power or pelf, victors or villains, courage or cowardice, glory or gore, triumph or travail—is rapidly filled up.

That’s also because India is never static—it is in constant motion. Beneath its vastness and deceptive calm lies a restless sea of humanity. The churning can at times be extraordinarily supportive, causing a rising tide of prosperity and cheer, or on occasion be terrifyingly brutal, sending a tidal wave of destruction and misery.

Ancient India looked upon all this as part of a cosmic dance of the universe in which giant galaxies get born or extinguish themselves with metronomic regularity. Hindu cosmology depicted it as Nataraja (the Lord of Dance), where Shiva performs the Ananda Tandava (the dance of bliss) in which, over aeons, the universe is created, preserved and then destroyed—only to be born anew.

The human species tried to encapsulate Time based on our limited life span. We first used the waxing and waning of the moon as our celestial clock and then the changing seasons (never our ageing bodies) to define a year. Later, astronomers calculated it on the basis of the time taken by the orbiting earth to complete a full circle around the sun.

Now, the year is used as a virtual marker of both an individual and a nation’s transition. And for a newsmagazine like India today to determine those individuals who stood out, dominated our consciousness and thereby the news, and defined the year by their achievements or foibles. In 2017, there was no vacuum of newsmakers, whether those who inspired or those who failed us. It was a year of new beginnings as well as old endings.