We woke each day in 2023, it seemed, to ever bleaker news. In India, we witnessed deadly ethnic conflict in addition to the relentless assaults on children, women, Dalits, Muslims, Christians, queer folk and other vulnerable groups, and to increasingly frequent disasters – ‘natural’ and more obviously human-made. All exacerbated by the inexorable erosion of our democratic rights and freedoms and the institutions designed to protect them.

Each Orwellian headline at home was matched and outdone by terror, massacre, ethnic cleansing, wars and extreme climate events around the world. Every institution of governance, whether charged with ensuring peace and security, economic well-being, or combating the existential climate crisis, revealed itself to be irretrievably broken.

 We lived, almost literally, Antonio Gramsci’s quote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Or, as Deb Chachra - Professor of Engineering at Olin College in the USA - put it, “We are living at the cusp of remaking ourselves from a primitive  species that gets most of our energy from literally setting stuff on  fire, and that just junks stuff when we’re done with it, into a species  that fits harmoniously into a planet-wide ecosystem." Getting there requires remaking our economics, politics, societies, value systems, and power structures. With unsurprising resistance from those who most benefit from the status quo and from those who seek to construct new feudal fiefdoms built on data and technology.

 Through the pervasive turmoil, however, shone glimmers of light — people, most often the ones we refer to as ‘ordinary’ — performing extraordinary acts of courage, resistance and love. Poets and journalists, children and parents, teenagers and elders, sportspersons and comedians, lawyers and artists, doctors and activists, scientists and musicians of every nationality, ethnicity, race, class, caste and gender standing up to tyrants and oppressors, bigots and purveyors of hate, lawmakers and lawbreakers, to protect and defend their families, neighbours, communities, nations, and our planet, often in the face of overwhelming odds. Too many paid with their lives, livelihoods or freedom. But it was their acts of kindness and courage that allowed us to replenish our reserves of compassion, empathy, resilience, even sanity. When you look up from doomscrolling, there are more people inventing more new ways of looking at, and doing things that challenge tired, outdated, toxic paradigms than ever before. And they are better able to find each other to collaborate and co-create.

I have the good fortune to interact and work with many of these remarkable individuals and groups. From them, I’m taking three lessons into the new year.

First, that our greatest challenge is not this or that government, party corporation, billionaire or ideology. It is, in fact, cynicism — the belief that things are inevitable, that we are too powerless to effect change, that our actions do not count — that is our greatest adversary.

Second, that all around us are people, especially younger people, and those on the margins of our societies, who simply refuse to buy the notion that things — economics, politics, culture, ecology — have to persist in their current form and who are willing to challenge these systems at their root with few resources beyond their creativity, courage, persistence and networks of like-minded allies and friends.

And finally, that we habitually underestimate their power and our own to stand up to the forces of hate, bigotry, violence and ecocide.

 Wishing you hope, courage and success in every endeavour you pursue in 2024 and the time and space to relax, reflect, connect, laugh and be joyful through the year.

Love and solidarity,

Ingrid

*Incidentally, 2024 is the year of the dragon in the Chinese calendar.