As 2026 dawns, let us ring the bells that can still ring

At the end of each year, I search my soul to draft a New Year message for near and dear ones, among others, assessing the year gone by and looking forward to the coming year with hope and expectation.

- ALOK SHEEL

While global economic growth has settled at a little above 3% over the last few years after recovering from the covid crisis, uncertainty arising from US President Donald Trump's tariffs hangs over the global economy, haunted as it is by the century-old ghost of America’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Indeed, the fate of the entire postwar order currently hangs in the balance.

Man doth not live by bread alone. There has also been a growing unease for some time and a somewhat sombre state of mind. There was a sense that the core values I have cherished since my growing-up years - of individual freedom of expression, social equality, humanism, harmony and religious universalism-were under threat.

Despite their outsized potential, recent advances in technology like social media and Al have created new challenges. They have accelerated socioeconomic inequalities and created a growing disgruntled underclass that enabled populist demagogues to ride to power on a form of belligerent nationalism that has divided rather than united people.

These new technologies created new means of control and made civil society more divided, angry, combative and disrespectful, often within the same family. Trump and the 'Make America Great Again' ((MAGA) phenomenon were symptomatic of these developments that had echoes all over the democratic world, including India.