Every year comes dyed in the colours of the words that marked it – words tossed out in conversations, in speeches, in literature, in court verdicts, in policy statements, on sports fields, in media narratives. Gathering them is a fraught business, many important words get left out, but here goes…The year 2025 marks the completion of a quarter of the 21st century. It was a year when time passed sometimes so slowly that you could hear its steady pulse and sometimes so rapidly as if the world was heading for a catatonic seizure. It was a year that had lexicographers desperately search for the word that would best sum it up. Could it be slop, the liquidy mess piped in through the internet which inundated our minds, as the Merriam-Webster people suggest; or rage-bait, online content that causes us to froth in the mouth, as proffered by the Oxford dictionary nerds? Both words are apt, but neither reflected the crassness, careless cruelty and fascist impunity that marked the year. According to the Chinese, this was the Year of the Snake. But snakes could well display greater compassion than did humans this year.Gaza remained the Ground Zero of human barbarism, continuing to demonstrate to the world how savagery is a foreign policy goal for genocidal states like Israel. Here humanitarian aid came laced with murder; ceasefire translated as ceaseless fire. To this day Gazans live in fear of bombardments and its babies wake up shivering with fright, in fact the largest cause of child deaths this year was Israel. And in Sudan, again, we saw again how babies were paying the ultimate price of warfare.Palestinian Mohammed al-Jabri, 58, warms himself next to the fire as he sits on the rubble of a building destroyed during the Israeli air and ground operations in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, in Gaza City, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.Savagery bloomed like a lotus in the world’s oldest democracy as well. Lynchings of Muslims and Muslim-seeming migrants came to be normalised across the country, from “progressive” Kerala and Karnataka to Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. On Christmas Day, even as the prime minister attended Christmas mass in the capital, Sangh Parivar troopers were out terrorising Christian worshippers on grounds that they were proselytising Hindus. So normalised has lynching become that neighbouring, turmoil-ridden Bangladesh picked up the habit of killing hapless minorities, in this case Hindus like Dipu Chandra Das and Amrit Mondal.Popular cinema was honed into instruments of anti-Muslim hatred. While Chhava, which drew on the Maratha resistance to Aurangzeb (who else?) stoked riots in Nagpur, Dhurandhar, a stylishly made spy thriller packed with unsavoury characters bearing Muslim and Pakistani identities, set the box-office on fire in December, with world-wide collections touching Rs 1006.7 crore! But such a story line is bound to sell in a year that saw the brutal, unconscionable massacre of 26 people who only wanted an enjoyable holiday in a beautiful meadow in Pahalgam. It was perpetrated allegedly by the Pakistan-based terrorist group ,The Resistance Front’ (TRF) and led to Operation Sindoor, which could be considered the fifth major war between India and Pakistan. The Indian television media donned military fatigues, figuratively speaking, making the most incredulous claims. Karachi harbour, is burning, they screamed. This surfeit of prime time patriotism prompted a young soldier to post his plans to enjoy “Icecream in Lahore”. But the disaffected within the country continued to strike back through terrorist acts as the Red Fort blast indicated.Hate spewed out of not just cinema auditoriums, but in election rallies and within courts. A 71-year-old lawyer weighed down by the animus he bore towards a Dalit Chief Justice of India for supposedly ‘disrespecting’ the sanatan dharma, felt emboldened to hurl a shoe at him inside his court room. Electioneering turned toxic, not for the first time, whether during the Delhi polls in the beginning of the year or the Bihar polls towards its end. But it was the latter that came wrapped in an enigma. A few weeks before it was to take place, the Election Commission of India unrolled what it termed as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), designed ostensibly to “purify” the election rolls. If the pre-election timing was intriguing, the result of the exercise was unambiguous: the BJP with its coalition partner, the JD(U), won handsomely. The Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi addressed three press conferences on what he termed as election theft or vote chori. But a suborned media ensured that his charges didn’t travel far enough to damage the ruling party’s fortress. Meanwhile, Union Home Minister Amit Shah ordered the ECI to Detect, Delete, Deport people he termed as infiltrators and the ECI faithfully began labelling many genuine voters as having shifted, were absent, or dead, which could well lead to a situation of mass disenfranchisement, especially among the extremely poor minorities, people like Sunali Khatun, a pregnant domestic worker from Birbhum. She was rounded up falsely as a Bangladeshi during an identity verification drive and deported. The case was shown to be false and the Indian government had to bring her back.Bhodu Seikh (left) and Jyotsna Bibi (right), parents of Sunali Khatun, along with Sunali’s two minors at Rampurhat Government Medical College and Hospital, in Birbhum, Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: PTI.It was a year when what the government said and what it meant was never the same. As the AQI shot up, the IQ and EQ of its leaders plummeted. The government claimed to be the guardian of the country’s natural resources but ensured its corporate friends could carry on razing forests, mining hills, and plundering the oceans. Every “green” solution it offered came with fine print. The crackers were green, it said, but they left Delhi choking on toxic air for weeks after Diwali; the Aravallis were protected, it said, but only hills over 100 metres above ground level. It maintained that there was no stampede at the Kumbh Mela, only a stampede-like situation. It claimed to protect Workers’ rights under the Four Labour Codes, but ensured they have no right to unionise despite a 12-hour working day. It wanted to protect us from digital scammers, but you had to surrender all your data to the government through an app called Sanchar Saathi. It wanted to protect your right to privacy through the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act but told us sternly that we must forget about our right to information. It was that kind of year, in which the government told us that it had to be cruel in order to be kind and were therefore disappearing the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act, catering to 265 million along with the Mahatma, so that “efficiency” could be restored to the jobs scheme.Anniversaries filled 2025 like raisins in a cake. It was a year when the prime minister turned 75, the RSS turned 100 and Vande Mataram turned 150 – each occasion turned into a moment of political triumphalism for the ruling party. There was even a special parliamentary session devoted to Vande Mataram. But the session stood out not for the prime minister’s fiery takedown of his bete noire, Jawaharlal Nehru, but for a delicious blooper made by a ministerial colleague who referred to the song as Vande Bharat, the semi-high-speed train. The RSS celebrated its birthday by shedding its abstemiousness and built itself Keshav Kunj, a swanky new Rs 150-crore complex of high-rises in the heart of the capital. Clearly it has major plans for the next 100 years.A protest over the arrest of climate activist Sonam Wangchuk in New Delhi, September 26, 2025. Photo: Karma Bhutia/PTIKindness and cruelty went hand in hand in everything the government did this year. While we are grateful that Bhima Koregaon prisoners Rona Wilson, Sudhir Dhawale, Jyoti Jagrap and Hany Babu saw freedom, some of our finest young people continued to be locked away without bail. It was a year that saw the government allow rapists of all stripes, including godmen like Asaram and Ram Rahim, to step out of jail. The shock waves that accompanied the pre-mature release of former MLA of Uttar Pradesh, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was justified on the specious grounds that an MLA is not a “public servant” (no matter if he is a public gang rapist?). So twisted was justice in 2025, that an internationally awarded innovator and Ladakh’s heartbeat, Sonam Wangchuk, continues to be incarcerated while Kerala superstar Dileep got acquitted in a 2017 sexual assault and abduction case. India saw many other freaky moments. Killer cough syrups made news, and the ruling party’s treasure chest grew and grew thanks to “friendly” donors: Rs 6,088 crore when last heard, 4.5 times the total contributions to a dozen Opposition parties. Among the quirky famous phrases that emerged this year, perhaps the winner was this one: “Bridge has not collapsed, it has sat down”, although the Delhi Police also gave us some good ones too when arguing that the young activists charged with fomenting the Delhi violence of 2023 were seeking a “regime change”.Does one laugh or cry at the absurdities that 2025 threw at us? Our Words Fail Us, which was the final sentence of Salman Rushdie’s 2025 book, The Eleventh Hour. Ultimately, we tried to console ourselves, taking heart from random developments like the amazing performances of our women’s cricket team. After all, we, whether Hindu or Muslim, whether Christian, Sikh, Jain or Buddhist, are Homebound. For us, there is No Other Land, it is here that we light our Heart Lamp and hope that 2026 proves to be kinder, less toxic than 2025. §Readers write in…Since this is the last column of the year, every effort has been made to accommodate all the letters received. Given space constraints, we could not accommodate in this column mail that came in late. To all our readers, a very happy 2026!§Male predators: Nothing has changed, it seemsMail from well-known theatre personality, Sohaila Kapur…Just read a piece in the Wire (‘Five Years After #MeToo, Has Anything Changed in the World of Theatre?’, December 15) on safety issues for young women in theatre. Seems like little has changed in the four decades since I joined theatre as a young hopeful. Two top theatre stalwarts had made serious advances that scarred me and one of them, who couldn’t take his hands off me, abused me and threw me out of his production after only one performance, to absolve himself of the guilt and, I suspect, wagging tongues. His excuse? “You can never be an actress. Don’t waste your and my time.” Strange that I went on to make a success of that very career. The sad part is his favourite male students made it all the worse for me by insulting me openly, ensuring that I left the group. The toxic masculinity and sense of entitlement that continues to persist appalls me.§Deleted from electoral rollsIn this season of SIR, and deletions in electoral rolls, an irate voter, Dr Sumit Basu, an IIT professor, reveals a personal experience:For the second time, my wife’s name has been struck off the voter list. The first time was in 2019, when both our names were found to be missing. We then got ourselves re-enrolled by submitting new Form 6, which are meant for first-time voters. Now, even after we were issued EPIC numbers in 2021, my wife stands disenfranchised. We have been living where we are now for the past 21 years. We have all the conceivable identity documents. We are educated and privileged individuals – yet we find ourselves helpless against what seems to be completely arbitrary action by the election authorities. We did contact our BLOs. She claims that she discovered some discrepancy and decided to strike my wife’s name off. It is surprisingthat the BLO (the lowest official in the pecking order) can unilaterally take this decision to strike somebody off the electoral rolls without even having to inform them or trying to rectify whatever discrepancy she finds.§Creative historyReader George Ninan has some correctives for a Wire article:I have written to the writer of the story seeking elucidation of ‘facts’ he has asserted. Don’t imagine he would respond. “This is the first time I have read that the pepper trade to Europe from Malabar was over the silk route that brought in porcelains, teas, and silks to Europe. As for the closing of the ‘silk route’ by the Ottomans in 1453, being the driver to ‘European colonialisms’, viz. that the villains were the Muslim Ottomans, is typical orientalism of creative scholarship. Prior to the rise of the Ottomans, western Europe enjoyed the advantages of Byzantine Constantinople as the bridge between Asia and Europe. The Ottomans levied higher rates of transit fees, and customs duties. And Muslim merchants would have their paper-work cleared more easily. Did the Ottomans indeed kill the goose that laid their golden eggs? For Christian Europe to wistfully reminisce over the ‘good old days’ of the Mongol empires straddling Asia is typical.“One of the demands the Portuguese made on the Zamorin was that Muslim traders, Moors, be excluded from the pepper trade. Viz they would prefer not to have to deal with Arabs and Malabar Muslims, and would have their own compradors, dubashis — Keralan Kristiani who had joined their Roman church. The Zamorin declined, and over the next fifteen years Malabar, Cochin, Kollam faced Lusitanian brutality…”“Does not seem the way of shrewd, astute merchants seeking to bypass Ottoman hegemony over the final leg of the silk route. But more in keeping with the infamous European Crusades to the eastern Mediterranean that resulted in more mostly peaceful Eastern Christian communities and Jews being slaughtered by the Crusaders than the decidedly martial Muslims.”§What’s happening in India?Mahaalakshmi asks a question playing on many minds…Has India’s democracy turned authoritarian? Recent news suggests that democracy is not working in India. Authoritarian is working in India. We, the readers, raise this question.§Santosh Kumar writes about a disturbing trend:“What farces we have been witness to in these times! Unemployment is soaring, inequality is widening, but our parliamentarians have no time to discuss those issues. Instead we discuss ‘Vande Mataram’. Listen to the main speaker. He represents a group that had no role at all in the Independence movement. The saddest thing is that prime minister and company are successfully driving the country by looking at the rear mirror. Meanwhile a Russian president who is butchering dozens by the day goes and prays at the samadhi of the greatest apostle of peace! He dares to make some comments on the visitors’ book too, even as our media celebrates the occasion.”§Malware and its mischiefMuralidhara HB has some words of praise for a Wire piece…“Thank you for the article, ‘Malware Evidence in Their Own Reporting?’ Global Experts Reiterate Bhima Koregaon Reports, Seek End to Injustice’ (November 26). It is a brilliant investigative report by journalists and forensic experts. It was so grasping, I read every word of it.“Nothing new in it though. Such reports have been published earlier too by other platforms. But the sheer scale of malware deployed on a number of civic-minded citizens who were only trying to help the helpless and the resultant incarceration of 16 innocent Samaritans for years in the infamous Indian prisons is the worst-first of its kind in the world. For lack of a better word, I say this is horrifying.”§Reprehensible act, CM Nitish KumarAsha Yadav, president, and Kavita Sharma, general secretary, All India Democratic Women’s Association, wrote in: AIDWA of Delhi-NCR is outraged at the reprehensible act of the Chief Minister of Bihar Mr Nitish Kumar. The snatching of hijab of a doctor who was to receive her appointment letter is a case of sexual harassment and should be dealt with accordingly. An accused has to be tried as per the law of the land, whoever he be. There has to be zero tolerance to sexual harassment at all levels regardless of the position of the perpetrator and the caste or religion that gives him the impunity. Of course this incident is used to fan communal fires as one can see from the manner in which the CM is being endorsed by a minister in UP and a minister at the Centre. The patriarchal mindset unites them all. §Another demand for action against Nitish Kumar…We the undersigned are writing to you on behalf of the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), seeking immediate and firm legal action in the light of a recent outrageous incident, wherein Mr. Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar, publicly violated the dignity of a woman from a minority community. Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in