Every new year signifies a movement forward in time, into an uncharted future.
Irrespective of how we may have counted the years of the twentieth century, we have now moved, incontrovertibly, into the new millennium. Some answers to this question have been attempted in year-end reviews in our newspapers. By and large, we tend to pine for what is not when we, in Shelley's words, look before and after . And when we look carefully, it is hard to ignore the dark forces of extremism and obscurantism that are surrounding our hopes for an enlightened and democratic future. What makes this onslaught more frightful is that the present rulers seem unwilling to check this drift.