They say, “Ummeed pe duniya kayam hai (the world survives on hope),” but reading Dastaan-e-Ummeed can make one believe that perhaps “Ummeed pe duniya badal bhi sakti hai” – hope can also change the world.Vikas Bajpai’s Dastaan-e-Ummeed: Struggles of Resilience, Hope and Belonging is a collection of essays which can be described as a resource of human solidarity. It is organised in six sections with descriptive titles. While sections titled ‘Cleaning of the ‘Augean Stables’ and the struggle that JNU waged against it’, ‘The pandemic pandemonium’ and ‘Fuelling hope: The great Indian farmers’ struggle’ are set around recent events, the other three sections are on more wider concerns such as ‘Fault lines of India’s secularism’, ‘Indian democracy’s underbelly’, and ‘The delight of an insidious hope.’‘Dastaan-e-Ummeed Struggles for Resilience, Hope and Justice,’ Vikas Bajpai, AlterNotes Press, 2025.Some of the essays take the shape of personality sketches, others read like philosophical tracts, travelogues, criticism, reportage, and even witness testimony. Alert to cruelty and suspicious of patriotic certitudes, Bajpai writes in response to the ethical demand to remain responsive to suffering wherever it appears. The prose is steeped in a poetic temperament but Bajpai also seasons the book generously with Urdu verses. It is almost as if he offers another vocabulary to add to the political language. The remarkable thing about the book is the praxis of hope is meant to be discovering through gestures of courage, tenderness, comradeship, and moral imagination.Bajpai, is known as a highly competent and compassionate doctor, but beyond that, the book reveals his deep concern for the social conditions that systematically produce disease, suffering, and unequal access to healthcare. The structure of the book is quite unconventional with experiential vignettes, reflective essays, photographs, and travel accounts that give us a wing-side view of Bajpai’s life and perspective. Best described as an experimental semi-autobiography, this book deserves to be read widely because it presents a complex and compelling image of a political activist. Combining memoir writing and social commentary with a distinctly activist tone, this book is an excellent representation of a life lived with ideological commitment.Despite having been part of prestigious institutions such as JNU and AIIMS, the author appears to have intentionally refrained from adopting an academic style or engaging in abstract theoretical debates. Instead, he articulates his experiences as social commentary. Throughout the book, individual experiences are consistently connected to broader social structures. The section on the pandemic addresses some of the defining crises of our times – social oppression, inequality, communalism, and public health through lived experience. The anecdotes from JNU provide valuable insight and will surely contribute to the understanding of readers wishing to decode the enigma of JNU.The author is at pains to illuminate the structural roots of contemporary social and political crises while pointing towards collective agency and transformative political action as pathways to a more humane society. For example, the references about the 2020-21 farmers’ struggle at the national capital come across as an expression of victory of the people’s will over the petty parliamentary political manoeuvres. The quality of its arguments and the richness of its evidence are maintained throughout the text.One of the book’s greatest achievements is the clarity with which it establishes the relationship between theory and practice, as well as between knowledge and political action. The essay ‘Fault lines of Indian secularism’ nudges with nuance the schooled middle-class reader to accept the people as they are despite their caste, creed, nationality, religions and other such differences, and to be humane towards them.Unlike conventional autobiographies, which often celebrate personal achievement or individual success, Dastaan-e-Ummeed locates the individual’s journey within the larger history of collective struggles. The “self” is presented not as an isolated hero but as a participant in broader movements for social justice. Bajpai uses his personal experience as a means of understanding historical processes and at no point uses the essays to stage his own life as something exceptional. One of the book’s most significant contributions is its attempt to preserve collective memory. Dominant institutions frequently shape public history by privileging the narratives of political elites, corporate leaders, and celebrated personalities while marginalizing the experiences of ordinary people and grassroots activists. In this collective biography of our times the author writes to recover many of these silenced histories and preserve traditions and narratives of resistance that might otherwise disappear from public consciousness.It goes without saying that biographical accounts of lived lives possess a distinctive pedagogical strength. In Dastaan-e-Ummeed, the reader encounters the process through which political consciousness develops in response to lived reality. This pedagogical role becomes significant in an age when information takes precedence over knowledge and reflection.Activist autobiographies restore the importance of sustained reflection, historical continuity, and critical inquiry, in a way that celebrity or star political personas cannot. They can give an insight into the fact that the process of social transformation is not the product of isolated or sudden twists and turns, but of long-term organising, ideological development, ethical commitment and collective action.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyContemporary neoliberal discourse celebrates self-making, personal branding, and individual success while obscuring the social conditions that shape individual lives. Dastaan-e-Ummeed reverses this perspective by showing that an individual’s growth is inseparable from broader social processes. The book links illness and injury to labour conditions, poverty, violence, ecology, displacement, or state policy and shows that that healing cannot be separated from transforming the conditions that repeatedly make people ill. Bajpai repeatedly returns to the theme of solidarity and explores solidarity as sympathy for suffering of people removed from one’s immediate context, but also shows that it is very much a material and organisational practice. Numerous essays in the book show that his participation in trade unions, anti-war campaigns, medical relief work, anti-communalism advocacy are not just symbolic. The photographs in the book let us witness what he saw too in a way that prose cannot. They literally give face to the encounters the author has had in his multifarious practice.Dastaan-e-Ummeed is a delightful immersion in Bajpai’s Urdu literary cadence, his insights as an academic, and his will to make his words a political intervention. In a period marked by cultural homogenisation, historical amnesia, and political fragmentation, the book has the potential to become a valuable resource which documents how a vibrant, democratic, and progressive public culture was sustained in our times. It is somewhat a cliche but for professionals such as doctors, teachers, lawyers, scientists, and artists, activist autobiographies demonstrate how professional knowledge can become an instrument of public service rather than being merely a means of personal advancement. They illustrate that expertise acquires its fullest social meaning when it is placed in the service of democratic values, human dignity, and social justice.We have a long tradition in India where a discussion on political lives produces a succession of freedom fighters, reformers, martyrs, and even a more ambiguous catch-all term ‘nation-builders’ often attributed to technocrats, bureaucrats and businessmen. But activists writing in the recent decades, reflecting and standing witness to the political processes they have participated in, are very few. I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that Dastaan-e-Ummeed will be found interesting by all progressive readers but especially by social and political activists. Activist lives are rarely made only of victories. They include defeats, exhaustion, ideological fractures, lost comrades, state repression, changing political climates, and the painful labour of keeping organisations alive. Vikas Bajpai is candid in expressing his pain and disappointments in the book but has been sparing with the forensic details about such moments, perhaps to remain hopeful.Pravin Nadkar is a Mumbai-based political, cultural activist and filmmaker.