NEW DELHI: Well, the 21st century did not begin with collapse, though many feared it would. The Y2K bug, imagined as a digital apocalypse, fizzled into nothingness, leaving fireworks, relief, and an early lesson — the century’s most profound transformations would not arrive as sudden breakdowns but as accelerating currents.
What followed has been an era defined less by singular inventions than by the convergence of technology, power, fear, speed, and scale. The first true rupture came not from technology but from terror. The September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and did far more than bring down buildings. They rewired global psychology.
Borders hardened, surveillance expanded, and the language of permanent emergency entered everyday life. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Syria tested military strategies in a world where ideology moved faster than armies and non-state actors challenged state power. Terror struck from London to Mumbai to Paris, revealing how globalised networks could spread mindless violence across borders.
Yet even as fear shaped geopolitics, optimism reshaped daily life. In 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, an object that quietly reordered civilisation. It collapsed camera, map, newspaper, wallet, and workplace into a single glowing rectangle. Price barely mattered. The smartphone changed how people waited, loved, argued, and remembered. Always on, always near, it became the an intimate technology harvesting attention and data with equal ease.
Social media arrived as a force multiplier. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok blurred the line between audience and author, turning the personal public and reshaping privacy itself. They fuelled revolutions and spread misinformation, fostered solidarity and amplified loneliness. The Arab Spring revealed the emancipatory power of networked protest, but also its fragility. Its echoes, however, lingered from Nepal to Bangladesh.
Truth became contested terrain. Virality replaced verification. Politics turned performative, polarised, and algorithmic. Economics fractured as well. The 2008 global financial crisis shattered faith in institutions once considered invincible. Abstract financial instruments devastated ordinary lives. In its wake rose populism, austerity, and distrust, fuelling Brexit, Trumpism, economic nationalism, and trade wars.
Amid this turbulence, symbols mattered. Barack Obama’s election in 2008 suggested history could bend toward inclusion. The backlash that followed showed progress needn’t be linear. Same-sex marriage in the US, decriminalisation of homosexuality in India, and the outlawing of practices like triple talaq marked legal recognitions of long-denied dignity.
India’s own trajectory mirrored the century’s contradictions. It combined technological ambition, reaching Mars on a shoestring, with assertive nationalism and a tougher security doctrine. Surgical strikes, Operation Sindoor, demonetisation, GST, the Ayodhya verdict, and the abrogation of Article 370 reshaped politics and state power.
Then there was COVID-19. Declared a global public health emergency in January 2020, it exposed the fragility of systems worldwide. Official death counts masked a far grimmer reality, especially in poorer nations.
Artificial intelligence crossed from curiosity to social force. Space exploration became routine, climate change unavoidable. What defines the first quarter-century is speed. Everything accelerated — communication, outrage, discovery, collapse. Power centralised and decentralised at once. History may remember this era for what it set irreversibly in motion.
