2022: Hope & Fear

What a difference a month makes. At the start of November, 2021 seemed well on its way from the worst of times which it had showed us in April, to a holiday season of laughter and forgetting. Normalcy, or at least ‘the new normal’, seemed like the catchphrase for the coming new year. That and ‘endemicity.’ And then on November 26, we got something much catchier: Omicron.

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The fourteen essays in our New Year special were always going to be an equation of hope and caution, but as you will see they are all December’s children: sober, if not sombre, their optimism a guarded memory. Our economists warn of bottlenecks and new challenges, our distinguished epidemiologist advises eternal vigilance and our geopolitical experts promise a world of uncertainties. Indian politics is a world unto itself, of course, one in which we can expect the current crisis to be trawled for electoral opportunities in the slew of state elections this year that could play out as a trailer to the main event in 2024. In truth, a few of our writers seem less disheartened by the pandemic than most—with their eyes on the long-term rise of the global Indian diaspora, or even welcoming the disruptions to our working routines that have hastened a new digital turn. Our climate change prognosticator does not invoke the Covid crisis at all but in her call for ‘business as unusual’ she does suggest that even if the pandemic has not really been ‘good for the environment’ it has given us pause to reconsider our priorities. Which is a hopeful, new year’s thing to do…

A QUARTET OF CHALLENGES

THE TRIALS THAT INDIA FACES IN 2022 REQUIRE AT THE HELM MODI THE STATESMAN RATHER THAN THE POLITICIAN

By RAJ CHENGAPPA