4th Dimension

Listen In English · Listen in English Listen in Hindi · Listen in Hindi What do you call a democracy that’s afraid of numbers? A performance. India, the world’s largest democracy, has quietly stopped counting. Not people. Not jobs. Not food. Not death. Not hunger. Certainly not truth. Since 2014, this country armed with satellites, biometric surveillance, and digital dreams has managed to misplace its most basic tool of governance: statistics. A Government of Headlines, Not Data You may have noticed. Every time the numbers start to get ugly unemployment rises, consumption drops, or fewer children are vaccinated those numbers vanish. Like magic. And if they don’t vanish, they arrive so late they miss the news cycle entirely. Take the 2021 Census. It’s now 2025. Still missing. We’re running a welfare state based on population data from when TikTok didn’t exist, and Modi was just entering his first term. Unemployment reached a 45-year high in 2017-18. That’s not a rumour,...

When I became a father, people asked me the usual question: “So, what will you name her?” I said, quite seriously, “Hansa Parekh.” There was a moment of stunned silence, then everyone burst out laughing. Apparently, this was either too lame or too meta for them. But for me, Hansa wasn’t just a sitcom character from Khichdi , she was an emotional landmark. I adored her since school days. She represented a kind of cheerfully oblivious optimism that no syllabus or sociological theory could ever teach. I often wondered: does anyone actually behave like this in real life? So detached from logic, yet so self-assured? Years later, when I stood in front of a classroom full of Gen Z students, I had my answer. They were all... a bit like Hansa. Confidently wrong, beautifully incoherent, and mesmerising in their ability to treat life like an abstract painting that nobody asked to interpret. Why do they take blurry selfies and call it “aesthetic”? Why are half their Instagram stories just ...

“ I want to write, but I don't have readers .” With this quiet lament, Nagendra Vijay; editor of Safar, announced the end of a magazine that, for over four decades, had faithfully delivered science in Gujarati to curious minds across India. For me, someone who love to finish reading entire issue of safari as soon as it arrives; Its closure is not merely a matter of lost pages but a signal of a much deeper cultural crisis: the erosion of scientific temperament in contemporary India. Safari kept me ahead from my time, I knew about Brahmos in 1997, I knew about Gazi Attack, Iraq evacuations, RAW missions, Massod Missions, Gaza Conflicts, Afghan war etc. before films/series were made on them through safari, Safari covered, history, polity and sociological topics in most engaging and intriguing ways. This magazine played vital role in groming my personality, my career and my thinking pattern. Now I think, what happened to a country that once positioned science at the heart of its nation...