The Soul of Indian Roads

Driving on Indian roads and especially its highways demands a particular kind of resilience and grit. 

It is, unambiguously, not for the faint-hearted. Around every turn, the road conspires to surprise you in stealth mode a sudden pothole swallowing your wheel, a speed breaker erected overnight at someone's whim, a wandering herd materializing out of nowhere, a hairpin bend cloaked in mountain mist, pedestrians crossing with sovereign indifference, two and four wheelers hurtling towards you from the opposite direction with the complete nonchalance of people who have long made their peace and have come to terms with whatever fate awaits them. 

Yet if this passion is to be indulged, one must accept and make their work around with all of what awaits them during the course of their road journey. At its core, it is a question of attitude, curiosity and perhaps, of love. I have also constantly been improving my style of defensive anticipatory driving during my trips very similar to seeking anticipatory bail. This has ensured safety for both me and my wife. 

We both share this passion as we share everything else: doing it together. Journeys by road is in both of our DNA's and we are fortunate to be able to delve into and pursue the same without apologies. Last year, we drove close to 7,000 kilometers from Mumbai through the verdant hills of Sikkim and the spiritual serenity of Bhutan, and back a journey that tested machine and man in equal measure. This year, we have already covered 2,000 kilometers on a drive from Mumbai to the other worldly salt flats of Rann of Kutch in Gujarat and back. And for four consecutive years from 2021 through 2024 we have participated in the Himalayan Drives organized by Team Firefox of Chennai, traversing between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers each time. We have driven across some of the most breathtaking terrain on earth, comprising of snaking through challenging mountain roads, driving through national forests experiencing complete solitude, on river beds and even where there were no roads but were part of our itinerary.

Driving abroad has its pleasures smooth, well-engineered roads, predictable signage, the quiet confidence of infrastructure that works. But monotony sets in early. There is little to surprise you, and nothing to move you in the absence of people on the way. Here in India, the roads may humble and exasperate, but they are never indifferent to your presence. And the people you meet along the way that is where the journey truly lives and one gets indoctrinated with an experience of a different kind. Roadside garages manned by street smart self-taught mechanics have taken improvisation to a new level and deserve true admiration.

The connections forged with strangers from every conceivable walk of life carry a warmth that no highway in the world can manufacture. A chai vendor at a remote mountain pass offering his humble hospitality as though you were a long-expected guest. A farmer pausing his work to raise a hand from his field. Village children urging you on with bright, unselfish-conscious enthusiasm, as though your mission were somehow theirs too. These moments are manna from heaven, unexpected, unearned, and utterly unforgettable. They have made us not just better drivers and road travelers, but more grateful human beings. Our journeys expose us and allow us to practice a religion of acceptance and humility totally imbibed on the fly and on the way. 

Indian roads, in the end, give back far more than they take.✍🏽

Syntax of war to a grammar of peace

I recently came across the phrase syntax of war to a grammar of peace used by former interim President of Israel Avraham Burg when speaking out on Benjamin Netanyahu’s killing spree in a no holds barred candid interview that he gave to Tucker Carlson recently. I strongly recommend readers to watch this interview.

In the interview Avraham Burg explains in plain and simple English how the average Israeli citizen’s existential fear of survival has been straightjacketed, a tunnel vision mindset intentionally created, and how over the years they have been indoctrinated with the narrative of incessant alleged looming of fogs of war and complete annihilation. This is also due to all forms of the media being completely tilted in favor of the ruling dispensation.

This phrase syntax of war to a grammar of peace stuck with me, and I decided to understand its meaning and applicability in today’s context with the war raging on Iran without abatement. The explanations given below are not my own, but what I have been able to ingest, understand and infer through the course of my research.

The phrase describes a fundamental shift in how people, leaders, and nations think, speak, and act. It means moving away from a mindset where conflict is solved by violence toward a mindset where harmony is built through understanding and cooperation.

Breakdown in simple English:

1. The Syntax of War

In language, syntax is the specific arrangement of words to form a sentence. As a metaphor, it refers to the immediate, reactive patterns of conflict - the shorthand of threats, violence, and defensive maneuvers used to respond to problems. Syntax refers to the rules of a language i.e. how words are put together. In this context, it means the rules of war language.

Characteristics: It treats conflict as normal and inevitable. It uses words like enemy, victory, survival, and coercion.

Goal: To justify violence and win at all costs. It often masks the true, brutal reality of fighting by calling it necessary or honorable.

Mindset: Us vs. Them.

2. A Grammar of Peace

Grammar refers to the entire foundational system and set of rules that make a language work. A grammar of peace suggests building a deep-rooted system of rules for society based on dialogue, forgiveness, and justice rather than just avoiding a fight. Grammar here represents a new set of rules for communication and interaction.

Characteristics: It treats peace not just as the absence of fighting, but as the presence of justice, fairness, and understanding.

Goal: To foster open, honest, and respectful communication that recognizes and values differences.

Mindset: Cooperation, reconciliation, and building trust.

Summary of the Transformation

Moving from a syntax of war to a grammar of peace means:

Changing the Language: Stopping the use of aggressive, polarizing language and starting to use words that build connections.

Changing the Action: Instead of reacting to problems with force (war), solving them through dialog, empathy, and negotiation (peace).

Changing the Goal: Moving from wanting to win to wanting to find a solution that works for everyone.

This shift requires a change in state of mind, moving from a position of fear and power struggle to one of community and shared future.

In simple English, moving from a syntax of war to a grammar of peace means changing the basic rules by which we live and communicate - moving away from a system built on conflict and toward one built on cooperation and understanding.

This concept is famously used by Pope Francis and other peace advocates to argue that peace is not just the absence of war, but a completely different way of structuring human relationships. It suggests that:

War is a failure of politics: It is seen as a defeat for humanity that ruins the bonds between people.

Peace requires a new language: To achieve lasting peace, we must stop using the logic of weapons (the syntax) and start practicing the logic of reconciliation (the grammar).

I can only hope and pray that wiser counsel prevails, and this madness of war is nipped before the point of no return is reached.✍🏽

Time is running out - The World Is Waiting for a Reckoning It May Never Get

History has repeatedly shown that the longer those in power refuse to acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of their decisions, the deeper the wounds they inflict on the civilizations they claim to lead. These man made open wounds would take generations to heal if attended to immediately otherwise their spread unchecked would be akin to a cancer going through a metastasis. 

The actions of leaders like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu pursued with a certainty that borders on zealotry have contributed to a spiral of instability, displacement, and death that now stretches far beyond the borders of any single conflict. Wars are no longer contained. Humanitarian crises bleed across continents. And the architecture of international law and diplomacy, already fragile, in a semi-comatose state grows more threadbare with every airstrike, every broken ceasefire, every inflammatory rhetoric made for domestic political gain to what end.

A genuine, unreserved acknowledgment of wrongdoing not the carefully lawyered non-apology of the political class, but a sincere mea-culpa would be, at this stage, both radical and necessary with time being of the essence. Not merely as a moral gesture, but as a practical precondition for the kind of de-escalation the world desperately needs.

Such a stark admission would not undo the death carnage. It would not rebuild flattened cities or restore shattered families. But it might just barely crack open the door to a negotiated return to reason. The world would not snap back to health; it would limp, as wounded things do. Recovery, if it came at all, would take years, perhaps generations.

But the window for even that diminished hope narrows with every passing day that accountability is deferred, deflected, or denied.

The clock is running. And those with the power to stop it seem, tragically, to be the least inclined to do so.✍🏽

The Creator & The Destroyer: Humanity's Bi-Polar Disorder & Eternal Paradox

When I peer down the long, winding corridor of human history's periscope, I am confronted by a dichotomy so startling, so profoundly irrational, that it leaves me simultaneously baffled and awestruck. For all of the centuries one has studied, cataloged, and debated the human mind, this singular contradiction remains stubbornly unresolved and perhaps will maintain its status quo.

Since the first human beings drew breath on this earth, they have carried within them two warring impulses, coiled around each other like opposing strands of the same helix. On one hand, there is the Creator that magnificent, almost divine force that compels us to build institutions, compose symphonies, paint cave walls, split atoms, nurse the sick, write poetry that outlives empires and create engineering marvels. And on the other hand, crouching in the same soul, lives the Destroyer the impulse that burns religious landmarks, silences those symphonies, and turns the very tools of progress into instruments of mass annihilation of humans and its creation.

What makes this paradox so deeply unsettling is not merely that both forces exist, but that they so often flow from the same source. The same restless intelligence that gave us medicine gave us poison gas. The same organizational genius that built civilizations engineered genocides. The same fuel that warmed our hearths razed entire cities to ash. We humans, in the most tragic sense of the phrase, are our own greatest contradiction.

Generations have come and gone, each inheriting this internal civil war as though it were encoded in the very marrow and DNA of bones and grey cells. Philosophers have agonized over it. Theologians have dressed it in the language of sin and redemption. Scientists have traced it through our evolutionary wiring and flawed trait. And yet, for all our self-awareness and we are, after all, the only species capable of examining ourselves with such levels of anguish we have proven spectacularly unable to silence permanently the destroyer within us.

The suffering born from this duality is not incidental. It is staggering in its scale and heartbreaking in its repetition. Wars are fought over the same grievances across different centuries. Cities are built and obliterated and built again on the same ground. Children are brought into a world their parents simultaneously strive to improve and imperil. There is a cruel, almost absurdist rhythm to it. Creation and destruction taking turns like seasons, except that the winters of our destructiveness seem to leave longer lethal scars taking generations to heal.

And yet and this is perhaps the most bewildering part of all and the silver lining, the Creator never surrenders. Even in the deepest trenches of human made catastrophe, someone is writing, painting, healing, planting, loving. The flame is never fully extinguished. Whether that speaks to our resilience or simply to the relentlessness of the cycle, I cannot speculate on the side of certainty.

What I can say is this: to look honestly at human history, resist both blind optimism and easy despair. It is to sit with and acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that we are capable of breathtaking beauty and cruelty sometimes in the same breath, many a time wielded by the same hands. 

Acceptance of this is the most human thing of all and then make our own individual attempts at working around it. Like it is a given that charity begins at home, so should we as individuals initiate changes starting with ourselves.✍🏽

Politicians & Their Shelf Life

There is a truth globally acknowledged yet universally ignored in the corridors of power: wisdom comes with age and experience, but only to a point. Beyond that point and the precise location of that point varies from individual to individual the curve begins its inevitable descent. *Humans are not exempt from the biological contract they were born into.* As they enter the sunset years of their lives, a distinctive and all too apparent erosion sets in, manifesting across multiple dimensions of human capability. Cognition slows. Memory, once a sharp instrument, begins to blur at the edges. Physical ailments accumulate like unpaid debts. Movement becomes labored. The latency in decision making that critical window between perceiving a situation and responding to it widens in ways that can carry enormous consequences when the decisions in question affect millions of lives.

Politicians are no exception to this universal law. Like products on a shelf, people in public life carry an expiry date. The packaging may remain impressive; the brand recognition may remain formidable. But inside, the contents age. The question that democracies and political institutions perpetually struggle to answer is not whether this erosion happens it does, always but how it is handled when it does. The answer to that question reveals much about the character of the individual, the health of the institution, and the maturity of the democracy itself.

The Best-Case Scenario: The Graceful Exit

The rarest and most admirable outcome is when the individual himself has an honest reckoning with this universal reality. He develops, over years of self-awareness, a clear eyed understanding of where he stands in the arc of his own capacities. He reads the signs not the flattery of his inner circle, not the roar of a loyalist crowd, but the quieter, more honest signals from within. He notices that the mental agility he once took for granted requires greater effort. He sees that the world is moving faster than his instincts were calibrated for. And rather than clutching the levers of power with whitened knuckles, he chooses to let go.

This is not retreat. This is statesmanship of the highest order. The individual phases out his involvement voluntarily, in a structured and deliberate manner, ensuring that his departure creates no vacuum, no rupture, no crisis of succession. He identifies, mentors, and actively elevates the qualified younger generation of public figures who will carry the work forward. He transitions from protagonist to custodian, from decision maker to institutional memory a role that carries its own dignity and indispensability. He goes into what might be called an open ended sabbatical: present enough to offer counsel when sought, absent enough to allow new voices the oxygen they need to grow.

History remembers these figures generously. They leave behind not just a legacy of what they did, but a legacy of how they left and that second legacy is often the more instructive one.

The Mediocre Case Scenario: The Reluctant Diminishment

Far more common is the scenario in which the politician is not entirely blind to his own decline but is psychologically unwilling to act on that awareness. He negotiates privately with the truth, acknowledging it in moments of solitude but suppressing it in the daylight of public life. He continues in his role, perhaps scaling back his ambitions incrementally, perhaps delegating more than he once did, but never formally or honestly addressing the elephant in the room.

The result is a prolonged twilight neither the full vigor of active leadership nor the clean break of genuine transition. Institutions begin to adapt around his limitations in ways that are rarely acknowledged openly. Staff fill in gaps. Decisions are quietly rerouted. The machinery of government or party continues to function, but with a subtle, systemic inefficiency that compounds over time. Meanwhile, the younger generation waits growing restless, growing cynical, or worse, leaving the arena altogether for other pursuits where merit is more transparently rewarded.

This scenario is damaging not through any single catastrophic failure but through the slow, invisible accumulation of missed opportunities and deferred transitions. The cost is paid not in headlines but in the quality of governance, in the morale of institutions, and in the long-term health of the democratic pipeline.

The Worst-Case Scenario: The Fortress of Denial

And then there is the most dangerous scenario of all the one that history, unfortunately, offers in abundance. This is the politician who has so thoroughly fused his identity with power that the prospect of stepping away feels not like retirement but like annihilation. For such an individual, the erosion of capacity is not a private reality to be managed; it is an existential threat to be defeated, denied, and, if necessary, concealed.

The mechanisms of concealment are well practiced. Carefully managed public appearances. Scripted interactions that minimize the risk of unguarded moments. A palace guard of loyalists whose primary function though never stated as such is to insulate the leader from any information that might challenge the official narrative of his continued vitality. Press conferences become rarer, or more tightly controlled. Decisions are delayed or delegated in ways that are never publicly explained. The institution begins to hollow out from the center, even as its exterior is maintained with great ceremony.

This is where the personal tragedy of ageing intersects most dangerously with public consequence. A declining politician in denial does not merely fail to lead well; he actively prevents others from leading. He crowds out successors, reads their ambition as betrayal, and punishes the very competence that the institution most needs. The result, over time, is a leadership landscape that has been deliberately thinned a desert where a forest should have grown.

The Systemic Failure: When Institutions Don't Intervene

Beyond the individual, there is a structural question that democracies have been remarkably poor at answering: what mechanisms exist to manage this transition when the individual himself will not? Age limits and term limits are blunt instruments, widely resisted and easily framed as discriminatory. Medical evaluations for sitting leaders are politically explosive and practically difficult to enforce in any meaningful way. The informal checks party colleagues, the press, the electorate have all demonstrated a recurring tendency to look away, either out of loyalty, fear, or simple inertia.

The result is that the burden of managing a politician's shelf life falls almost entirely on the politician himself, which is to say, it falls on the very person who has the most emotional investment in ignoring it. This is a design flaw at the heart of most democratic systems, and it is one that mature political cultures will eventually need to address with more rigor and less sentimentality than they have managed so far.

The Larger Lesson

The shelf life of a politician is, in the end, not merely a question of biology. It is a question of character, institutional design, and democratic culture. A society that builds honest, compassionate, and structured pathways for political transition that honors its elders without allowing them to become immovable fixtures is a society that understands the difference between respecting experience and being held hostage by it.

The greatest politicians, it turns out, are often remembered not only for what they built, but for knowing when to hand over the keys.✍🏽

High Crimes and Misdemeanors and the Ubiquitous Vacuum Cleaner

The Ancient Phrase and Its Enduring Weight. High crimes and misdemeanors is a term whose roots stretch back to 14th-century British parliamentary law, where it described offenses committed by high-ranking officials not merely against individuals, but against the very fabric of the state itself. When the framers of the American Constitution embedded this phrase into Article II, Section 4, they were doing something deliberate and sophisticated: they were borrowing a concept that had already survived centuries of political stress-testing, one that understood instinctively that power, when corrupted, corrupts differently than ordinary crime.

The phrase has never been a simple legal checklist. It does not require a statutory violation, a criminal indictment, or even a conviction in any court of law. What it demands instead is a reckoning with a harder, more philosophical question: has the officeholder behaved in a manner fundamentally incompatible with the trust placed in them? Has bribery purchased their loyalty away from the public? Has perjury poisoned the well of truth that democratic governance drinks from? Has official power been weaponized for personal gain, bending institutions designed to serve millions toward serving one? These are the offenses that "high crimes and misdemeanors" was always meant to capture not merely the criminal, but the corrosive.

The scope of the term has been fiercely contested throughout history precisely because it sits at the intersection of law and morality, of legal procedure and political philosophy. It is deliberately expansive, a feature rather than a flaw. The framers understood that they could not anticipate every form that official betrayal might take across centuries, and so they crafted a phrase capacious enough to accommodate the unimagined abuses of future generations.

The Vacuum Cleaner and Its Modern Operators - Yet here lies the great and troubling paradox of our present age: the very expansiveness of this standard, its reliance on public trust and collective moral judgment, has become its greatest vulnerability.

Leaders across the globe who find themselves under scrutiny for serious transgressions, corruption, abuse of office, the systematic dismantling of institutional safeguards have discovered and refined a remarkably effective counterstrategy. They have become virtuosos of what might be called the political vacuum cleaner: a sophisticated, industrial-grade apparatus operated not by themselves directly, but by an ecosystem of unscrupulous merchants of propaganda, hired architects of confusion, and compliant media organs willing to trade truth for access and access for their survival.

The mechanism works with depressing elegance. Before accountability can gain traction, before the evidence can be marshaled and the public can absorb its implications, the vacuum cleaner roars to life. It does not merely defend defense would concede that there is something to answer for. Instead, it performs a wholesale reversal of moral gravity. The transgressor becomes the transgressed. The powerful official who abused their office is repackaged, with extraordinary media agility, as a hapless victim: hounded by enemies, targeted by conspirators, martyred by an establishment threatened by their righteousness.

The barrage of counter-narrative is deliberate in its volume and velocity. Truth, after all, is painstaking it requires evidence, corroboration, context, and time. A lie, or a strategically deployed half-truth, requires only repetition and amplification. By flooding the information ecosystem with alternative framings before the original account can solidify in public consciousness, these operators effectively muddy the epistemic waters until the average citizen, exhausted and bewildered, simply cannot tell what is real. This is not accidental confusion; it is engineered confusion, and it is extraordinarily effective.

The Deeper Subversion - What makes this strategy so insidious is that it does not merely protect individual wrongdoers. It systematically degrades the very institutions and norms that "high crimes and misdemeanors" was designed to protect.

When accountability becomes permanently reframed as persecution, several things happen simultaneously. Witnesses are intimidated not by direct threat, but by the implicit lesson that speaking truth to power invites destruction. Investigators are delegitimized before they complete their work. The institutions charged with oversight legislatures, judiciaries, independent press are relentlessly portrayed as partisan weapons rather than neutral arbiters, until significant portions of the public genuinely cannot distinguish between the two characterizations. And perhaps most damagingly, the emotional and psychological cost of sustained public engagement with complex, deliberately obfuscated wrongdoing becomes so high that democratic fatigue sets in.

The vacuum cleaner, in other words, does not just clean up the mess left by high crimes. It gradually dismantles the very apparatus by which high crimes are recognized, prosecuted, and punished.

What Is at Stake - The framers who encoded "high crimes and misdemeanors" into constitutional law were betting on something: that a republic's citizenry would remain vigilant enough, and its institutions robust enough, to distinguish between a leader who had genuinely been falsely accused and one who had genuinely betrayed their trust. That bet rested on the assumption that truth, given adequate time and space, would be recognizable.

The modern propaganda vacuum cleaner is, at its core, an assault on that assumption. It is a bet placed in the opposite direction that truth, given enough noise and enough time pressure, becomes indistinguishable from its opposite. And in democracy after democracy, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, that counter-bet has been paying dividends.

The ancient phrase endures. But the machinery built to render it meaningless grows more sophisticated by the year. Whether democratic societies can recalibrate their institutions, their media ecosystems, and their collective epistemic standards to outpace that machinery remains, at this particular historical moment, genuinely and urgently unresolved.

The WhatsApp Obligation

The virus of FOMO has come home to roost, and nowhere has it made its presence more insidious than in the WhatsApp groups that have multiplied and metastasized across the globe. I would wager confidently that 95% of subscribers to these alleged Special Interest Groups have simply allowed themselves to be programmed: conditioned, like Pavlov's volunteers, to respond to any stimulus with a mandatory emoji or a hollow two-bit message. Festival or funeral, it matters not. The reflex fires. The thumb moves. The conscience is clear.

Over the years, these groups have multiplied with the vigor of unchecked organisms each sprouting sub-groups, each sub-group spawning sub-sub-groups until the original purpose, if there ever was one, is buried beneath an avalanche of forwarded memes, good-morning GIFs, and performative and perfunctory condolences.

What drives this behavior? Beneath the surface lies a quiet terror: the fear of popularity erosion. The anxiety of invisibility. Never mind whether one actually knows the audience or has anything meaningful to contribute. Silence, in this culture, is misread as indifference. And so relevance is quietly retired, shelved for posterity perhaps, while reflex ascends to become the new religion.

I have, over the years, tried to be deliberate subscribing only to a selective handful of groups where genuine interests are discussed, where I still hope my faculties might soak in some hard-to-find nourishment for my grey cells. But even these have proven fallible. They too attract the overzealous: the compulsive signatories who must make their presence felt on every thread, relevant or otherwise, as though existence itself requires constant witness.

The toll of deleting this daily deluge has visited upon me an unexpected adversary: carpal tunnel syndrome a painful condition born of repetitive strain, and a cruel irony for someone who joined these groups in pursuit of intellectual sustenance.

And so I am left with a Hobson's choice: endure the discomfort and preserve access to the rare, genuinely enriching exchange or exit entirely and surrender even that. For now, I have chosen the former. I limp along, thumb bandaged, scrolling with the weary patience of a man waiting for the trade-off to tilt, finally, in his favor.✍🏽

The emperor has no clothes.

We are all too familiar with the above phrase from an 1837 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a vain emperor tricked by swindlers into believing he is wearing exquisite, invisible clothes. The emperor’s bootlickers fearing they would seem stupid and disloyal pretended to see them until an innocent child declares the truth, highlighting themes of vanity, social pressure, and collective delusion.

The phrase is aptly applicable today to describe the state of affairs where a false but widely accepted narrative propagated by a political leader not only goes unchallenged but is endorsed with a lot of fanfare. This is generally happening because his cabinet caucus and die-hard inebriated loyalist party members are afraid to challenge his unilateral decision so as to not unsettle their own comfort zones privileged with power, gratification and their fan following.

This self-induced illusion, eluding them in harboring misplaced comfort stems from self-preservation. These men of straw intentionally and willfully, unashamedly allow self-denigration so as to not rock their respective boats and the truth gets put back on a back burner. Ground reality reasoning and dissection are relegated to the dustbins of history. They choose to forget that they are all individually and collectively accountable to the people they represent who had given them a mandate.

When a leader full of hubris under the mistaken notion that he can do no wrong surrounds himself with a flock of “yes” men, it often leads to disastrous and catastrophic results as my thoughts will make an attempt of revealing below.

This is exactly what is happening in the USA right now. The parallel given above has been leaned on by me to describe a situation in which in this case the Republican party loyalists and MAGA are unwilling to recognize, admit and challenge the all too obvious shortcomings, issues, and serious policy flaws with grave fall outs being implemented by their delusional, powerful and seemingly popular (in their eyes alone) leader, their President.

Boot lickers, sycophants and the all too powerful Zionist lobbyists have very successfully crafted an alarmist narrative during the last twelve months into his Presidency. This has been going on for years but in this President, they struck gold in finding a sucker. They have put him in a straight jacketed mental tunnel vision which solely exhibits their long-awaited objectives to be achieved. Neo-con spin masters have to a hubris riddled President continuously fed and embedded imaginary alarmist situations and successfully stitched a weave of dreaded thoughts for him to ingest at regular intervals. They have unfortunately convinced him that what they have stated is visible only to an enlightened and wise one like him and cannot be thought of by those who are ignorant, incompetent, or unfit to understand world politics. They finally convinced him to start walking the talk.

Disastrous press conferences after press conferences with shifting narratives are just the latest examples of how inconsistent and incompetent the President has become. What amazes me is how does he still have so many supporters amongst his flock? They are wearing blinders and not seeing the writing on the wall. Why can’t they see that their President has no clothes (metaphorically)?

The President’s latest dive into military adventurism with Iran at the instigation and behest of Israel and the neo-cons is, in fact, an unmitigated plunge into the bottomless abyss of global instability, pain and suffering for the world at large and Americans included.

Such is the power of crafted illusion that receptive cult members often soak and subscribe to its falsehood, mistakenly assuming everyone else believes in it, creating a “collective illusion”. It is a given that vanity leads to deception. The President’s excessive pride has made him easy to trick, influence and make him deviate 180 degrees from his 2024 election plank promises on which he won. The higher elevation the pedestal his cronies put him on, the fall will also be commensurately painful. But alas this fall will not just be for him but millions of people around the world as the toxic fallout will take humanity into its fold without exception.

Courage in Truth: Only the ones with true grit and a conscience, unburdened by social fear, have the courage to declare the obvious truth, demonstrating that honest, simple observation based on empirical evidence is more valuable than fearful conformity.

I pray that such a child amongst us in any part of the world shows up sooner rather than later to save all of us from Armageddon. Human suffering by now should become a spent force and fossilized permanently after the two world wars. 

It is unfortunate that MAGA which stood for Make America Great Again has mutated to Make America Gullible Again.✍🏽

Lying - The new normal & toll on humanity

Lying has become the new normal globally. People reading this may be taken aback by what seems like an outlandish statement and by my not mincing my words, all for a good reason though. The evidence surrounds us daily, hiding in plain sight. Deception is no longer the exception; it is increasingly the operating language of public life. 

This is being openly embraced by leaders, luminaries and heads across all domains, whether they come from politics, big business, medical and technological research, media houses, and religion. What was once considered a moral failing, something that would end a career or destroy a reputation, has been repackaged. It is now dressed up as spin, narrative control, strategic communication, or simply messaging. Lies have been crafted and laundered into respectability. The actors involved in this are governments, corporates, credit agencies, think tanks, religious heads, media houses, social media influencers and PR firms. There are many more in this list of accused but I have decided to name some of them germane to this malaise.

Politics: The Brazen Frontier

In the political arena, lying has arguably reached its most theatrical heights. Politicians have always bent the truth, but what is new is the shamelessness with which it is now done. Falsehoods are repeated loudly and often enough that they take on the texture of fact and stitched into a palpable mosaic. Voters are told what they want to hear, election after election, with little consequence for those who routinely deceive. The post-truth era is not a warning it is a description of where we already live.

Big Business: Dressed in the Language of Values

Corporate deception has grown increasingly sophisticated. Companies publicly champion environmental responsibility while quietly lobbying against climate regulation a practice so common it has earned its own term: greenwashing. Financial institutions present rosy forecasts to investors while internally managing entirely different expectations. The gap between what corporations say and what they do has never been wider, yet the marketing machinery has never been more polished.

Medical and Technological Research: The Integrity Crisis

Perhaps nowhere is the erosion of honesty more alarming than in the fields entrusted with our health and our future. Research fraud the manipulation of data, the suppression of unfavorable findings, the ghost-authoring of studies funded by industries with vested interests has become a systemic problem. Goal posts are being routinely shifted to enhance market share by ensnaring a larger fold of patients. The pressure to publish, to attract funding, and to validate institutional agendas has turned honest inquiry into something optional. Meanwhile, technology companies make sweeping promises about safety, privacy, and benefit to humanity that bear little scrutiny when examined closely.

Religion: Betrayal of the Sacred Trust

Religious institutions, which have historically positioned themselves as the moral conscience of society, have not been immune. Scandals of cover-up and concealment have rocked churches, temples, and organizations across faiths and continents. Leaders who preached integrity before their congregations were revealed to have been living double lives. The institution meant to hold the line on truth became, in too many cases, a machine for protecting its own image at the expense of those it was supposed to serve.

Why Has This Happened?

The normalization of lying is not random. It has structural causes. The relentless demand for short-term results creates incentives to misrepresent. Social media rewards confident, emotionally charged claims over nuanced, honest ones. A 24-hour news cycle and social media posts move too fast for accountability to keep pace. And crucially, when leaders lie without consequence, it sends a signal to everyone below them: honesty carries a cost, while deception pays dividends albeit short term. Aggregates of these short-term dividends are too big an inducement for people with no elastic moral compasses to ignore. 

There is also a psychological dimension. When lying becomes widespread enough, people stop expecting truth. They become cynical, then numb, and eventually complicit either by adopting the same behavior or by simply choosing not to look too hard. Gravity of the crime is mellowed and hollowed out stemming from apathy and attrition.

The Stakes

This matters enormously. Trust is the invisible infrastructure of civilization. Economies, healthcare systems, democracies, and communities all run on the assumption that people are at least most of the time telling the truth. When that assumption erodes, the costs are profound: institutions lose legitimacy, citizens disengage, cooperation breaks down, and the vulnerable are left without recourse and reconcile to their suffering.

The problem is structural, not merely ethical. As long as there are amongst clients of truth, financiers, the distortion will continue, sophisticated, deniable, and dressed in the language of optics. This isn't just dishonesty it's the corruption of the epistemic commons where the agencies entrusted with describing reality systematically distort it.

Calling lying the new normal is not cynicism for its own sake. It is a researched diagnosis. The first step toward any cure is an honest look at the disease, acknowledge its existence, seek remedial measures and thereafter disincentivize and penalize those who adapt it.