Prakash Kumar

When I was a teenager stepping slowly into adulthood, I often wondered what truly happens when one becomes old. Life, as I observed it, appeared to follow a fixed and relentless trajectory—education, job, marriage, family, possessions. Alongside this ran an unspoken but powerful current of comparison: first with classmates and colleagues, later with cousins, siblings, and finally with those closest to us. The race never paused. There was no finish line, only shifting reference points. During this long and breathless run, I held onto a quiet hope. I believed that with age and experience, people would eventually see the futility of endlessly amassing wealth and status. I imagined that maturity would bring a widening of vision—that people would recognize real wealth in humane relationships, empathy, and a deeper connection with the world beyond themselves. What I witnessed instead was deeply unsettling. Many of those I observed—people entering their sixties, seventies, eighties, and...

  As we witness the devastating conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and witnessing the rising tide of authoritarianism worldwide, Doris Lessing's 1957 reflections on the artist's role become more relevant. Since the 1960s, the world has moved from testing nuclear weapons to stockpiling large arsenals, while simultaneously creating an ecological time bomb. Today’s conflicts starkly put nuclear power nations against aspiring ones, while environmental destruction threatens all nations regardless of their arsenals.  Writing in the shadow of nuclear testing and the cold war, she understood something profound about how we face civilizational threats—and how easily we retreat into either "the pleasurable luxury of despair" or hollow platitudes. Her words remind us that in times when madmen hold switches of destruction, artists, writers and individuals bear a special responsibility: not to turn away from the nightmare, but to help us imagine what living might look lik...