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The Electric Vehicle Environmental Myth: What Happens Before and After the Charging Point?

The Battery Begins Its Life in a Mine

The battery is the most frequently overlooked component in the popular image of the electric vehicle. A conventional car certainly requires substantial quantities of steel, aluminium, copper, plastics, glass and other materials, but an electric vehicle adds a large electrochemical storage system whose manufacture depends upon an extensive international mineral supply chain. Lithium-ion batteries can involve lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper and other materials, depending on the particular chemistry.

The scale of this demand is already considerable. According to the International Energy Agency, global demand for batteries in the energy sector reached approximately 1 TWh in 2024, with electric-vehicle battery demand exceeding 950 GWh, an increase of approximately 25 percent in a single year. The IEA has reported that demand continued to grow strongly in 2025 as electric-vehicle sales expanded.

The consequences of this expansion are not confined to factories. Minerals have to be extracted from the earth, transported and refined before they become battery-grade materials. The IEA reports that demand for lithium rose by nearly 30 percent in 2024, while demand for nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements also increased substantially, with energy applications such as electric vehicles and battery storage accounting for much of the growth in several of these minerals. Mining can disturb land, consume water, generate waste and require large quantities of energy. The severity of these effects varies according to the mineral, extraction method, geographical location and environmental standards under which the operation is conducted, so it would be misleading to describe all battery mining as equally destructive. It would be equally misleading to pretend that the extraction has no environmental consequences simply because the final product is marketed as green technology.

Manufacturing Creates an Initial Carbon Burden

The environmental cost continues after the minerals have been extracted. They must be refined and transformed into materials that can be incorporated into battery cells, and those cells subsequently have to be assembled into modules and battery packs. Battery manufacturing is an energy-intensive industrial process, and the source of that energy has a direct influence on the resulting carbon footprint.

This produces an important difference between an electric vehicle and a conventional vehicle at the beginning of their respective lives. An EV can have higher manufacturing emissions because of its battery even though it can subsequently produce much lower emissions during operation. The International Council on Clean Transportation’s 2025 life-cycle assessment of passenger cars sold in the European Union estimated that battery-electric vehicles had approximately 40 percent higher production emissions than comparable internal-combustion vehicles, primarily because of battery production. The same study found that this initial disadvantage was offset after approximately 17,000 kilometres of use under the study’s European conditions.

This distinction is important because two statements that are frequently presented as contradictory are actually both capable of being true. An electric vehicle can require more emissions to manufacture than a comparable petrol vehicle while still producing substantially fewer emissions over its entire lifetime. The first statement describes the beginning of the vehicle’s life. The second describes the complete life cycle.

Electricity Does Not Come from the Charging Socket

The second major misconception concerns the electricity itself. An electric vehicle has no exhaust pipe, but the electricity stored in its battery has been generated somewhere. If that electricity comes predominantly from low-carbon sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectricity or nuclear power, the operational carbon footprint of the vehicle can be relatively low. If it comes predominantly from coal-fired generation, the climate advantage becomes smaller.

This is particularly relevant to India. The latest IEA data show that coal remained responsible for approximately 71 percent of India’s electricity generation in 2025, although that share has declined from approximately 74 percent in 2024 and 76 percent a decade earlier. At the same time, renewable generation continues to expand, meaning that India’s electricity system is gradually changing rather than remaining fixed.

The implication is not that an electric vehicle in India is simply a coal-powered vehicle. Such a statement would ignore India’s growing solar, wind and hydroelectric generation and would also ignore the expected decarbonisation of the electricity system. The implication is that the environmental performance of an EV cannot be separated from the electricity system that supplies it. An electric vehicle charged primarily from renewable electricity has a different life-cycle footprint from an otherwise identical vehicle charged from a grid dominated by coal.

The IEA’s global life-cycle assessment illustrates why the distinction matters. For a medium-sized battery-electric car sold in 2023, the agency estimated that lifetime emissions were approximately half those of an equivalent internal-combustion vehicle over roughly 200,000 kilometres under its stated-policies scenario. The advantage increases as electricity systems become cleaner.

Consequently, the criticism that “electric cars are powered by coal” is insufficient to establish that EVs are environmentally worse than petrol or diesel cars. At the same time, the assertion that an electric vehicle has no emissions is equally incomplete. The electricity source matters, and it matters considerably.

The Obsession with Range Creates Another Environmental Problem

The battery question becomes even more significant when vehicle size is considered. The automobile industry has increasingly marketed long driving ranges as a major selling point. Consumers naturally appreciate the convenience of travelling several hundred kilometres without recharging, but greater range usually requires greater battery capacity. A larger battery requires more materials and more energy to manufacture, and the additional weight has consequences throughout the vehicle’s life.

This creates a peculiar situation in which an enormous electric SUV can be marketed as an environmentally responsible product simply because it has an electric motor. The absence of a combustion engine does not make the vehicle immaterial. A large vehicle still requires large quantities of steel, aluminium, glass, plastics, rubber and battery materials, and it still consumes energy to move its mass.

The environmental difference between a small electric hatchback and a large electric SUV can therefore be substantial. The question should not merely be whether the vehicle is electric. It should include how much material was required to produce it, how large its battery is, how much electricity it consumes and how long it remains in service.

This is one reason why the environmental discussion becomes distorted when electrification is treated as the entire solution. Replacing a large petrol vehicle with a similarly large electric vehicle can reduce lifetime greenhouse-gas emissions, but it does not eliminate the resource requirements associated with private automobile ownership.

The Exhaust Pipe Disappears, but Particulate Pollution Does Not

There is another important environmental distinction. Electric vehicles eliminate tailpipe emissions, and this provides a significant air-quality advantage, particularly in densely populated urban areas. However, vehicles produce particulate matter through other mechanisms.

Tyres wear against road surfaces. Roads themselves undergo abrasion. Brake components generate particulate matter, although regenerative braking in electric vehicles can substantially reduce conventional brake wear. Dust deposited on roads can also be resuspended by passing vehicles.

Vehicle weight becomes important in this context. Electric vehicles can be heavier than comparable combustion vehicles because of their battery packs, particularly when they are designed for long driving ranges. An OECD analysis of non-exhaust particulate emissions examined this relationship and found that longer-range battery-electric vehicles can be substantially heavier than comparable internal-combustion vehicles. Its modelling included examples in which long-range BEVs were 34 to 41 percent heavier than corresponding internal-combustion vehicles, depending on vehicle class.

This does not mean that electric vehicles necessarily produce more particulate pollution overall. The reduction in brake wear and elimination of exhaust emissions remain important advantages. It means that the phrase “zero-emission vehicle” should not be interpreted as “zero particulate pollution”. The environmental effects of tyres, roads and vehicle mass remain relevant regardless of the propulsion system.

What Happens to the Battery at the End?

The battery introduces another question that will become increasingly important as the first large generation of modern EV batteries reaches the end of its automotive service life. A battery that is no longer suitable for a vehicle does not necessarily become useless. Depending on its condition, it may be capable of a second life in stationary energy storage before eventually being recycled.

Battery recycling can recover valuable materials and reduce dependence on virgin mineral extraction. The development of effective recycling systems is therefore central to the long-term environmental performance of electric mobility. At present, however, the industry is still constructing the infrastructure necessary to deal with the enormous number of batteries that will eventually reach retirement as the global EV fleet expands.

This is another reason why the environmental assessment of electric vehicles cannot stop at the point of sale. The true environmental footprint extends from mineral extraction through manufacturing and operation to reuse and recycling. A battery that is manufactured with high emissions, used for a relatively short period and poorly managed at the end of its life presents a different environmental calculation from one that remains in service for many years and eventually enters an efficient recycling system.

The Real Problem Is the Assumption That Changing the Powertrain Solves Everything

There is a broader issue that is often lost in the debate between petrol and electric vehicles. The environmental burden of transportation does not arise solely from the fuel used by a vehicle. It also arises from the production of vehicles, the extraction of materials, the construction and maintenance of roads, the creation of parking infrastructure and the enormous quantity of resources required to maintain a global system of private automobile ownership.

An electric vehicle changes the propulsion technology without eliminating these requirements. This is why a small, efficient vehicle can have a substantially different environmental footprint from a large vehicle, even when both use electric propulsion. It is also why public transportation, walking and cycling can provide environmental benefits that cannot be obtained merely by replacing one private automobile with another.

The IEA illustrates the efficiency advantage of electrification at the system level. Global EVs consumed approximately 180 TWh of electricity in 2024, yet the agency estimates that EV adoption can substantially reduce energy demand relative to conventional road transport because electric drivetrains are considerably more efficient. The IEA projects EV electricity consumption to reach approximately 780 TWh by 2030 under its stated-policies scenario, while total road-transport energy demand rises by only about 5 percent despite almost 20 percent growth in vehicle kilometres travelled.

The environmental challenge, therefore, is not simply that electric vehicles consume electricity. They consume electricity far more efficiently than combustion engines consume fuel. The challenge is ensuring that the electricity, batteries and materials required for this transition are produced with progressively lower environmental costs.

So, Is the Electric Vehicle Actually Greener?

The evidence does not support the claim that electric vehicles are an environmental fraud. Nor does it support the simplistic idea that an electric vehicle is automatically clean simply because it has no exhaust pipe.

The strongest available life-cycle assessments generally find that battery-electric cars have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than comparable petrol or diesel vehicles over their complete lifetimes. The ICCT’s 2025 European assessment estimated that battery-electric cars sold in the European Union produce 73 percent lower life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions than comparable gasoline vehicles, even after including vehicle and battery production, electricity production, maintenance and recycling. The study also found that the initial manufacturing emissions of EVs were recovered after approximately 17,000 kilometres under its assumptions.

The global picture is less uniform because electricity systems differ considerably between countries. The IEA’s global assessment nevertheless reaches the same broad conclusion, estimating that a medium-sized battery-electric car sold in 2023 produces roughly half the lifetime emissions of an equivalent internal-combustion vehicle over approximately 200,000 kilometres.

These findings matter because they prevent one environmental myth from being replaced by another. The existence of mining impacts, battery manufacturing emissions and coal-fired electricity does not prove that EVs are worse than conventional cars. The absence of tailpipe emissions does not prove that EVs are environmentally harmless. The truth lies in the life-cycle calculation.

India’s Other Motive: Energy Security

India’s transition towards electric mobility also needs to be understood within the broader context of national energy security. The environmental argument is prominent in public policy, but reducing dependence on imported petroleum is an equally significant strategic consideration. India imports the overwhelming majority of the crude oil it consumes, leaving transportation particularly exposed to international oil prices, geopolitical tensions, supply disruptions and movements in the value of the rupee. Every petrol and diesel vehicle therefore represents continuing demand for a commodity whose supply and price are substantially influenced outside India’s borders. An electric vehicle changes this equation by shifting a significant portion of transportation energy demand towards electricity, which can increasingly be generated from domestic sources such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power.

Government incentives for electric vehicles should consequently not be understood as measures motivated exclusively by climate policy. India’s electric-mobility programmes also serve industrial, technological and strategic objectives, including reducing petroleum consumption, developing domestic manufacturing capabilities and improving energy security. The environmental benefits are real, but they exist alongside these wider national interests.

There is also a long-term economic question that deserves public discussion. Electricity may currently appear considerably cheaper for transportation than petrol or diesel, particularly when an EV is charged at home, but today’s pricing structure cannot necessarily be assumed to remain unchanged as electric vehicles become widespread. Petrol and diesel generate substantial government revenue through excise duties, state taxes and other levies. If petroleum consumption declines substantially, governments will eventually face the fiscal question of replacing at least part of that revenue. At the same time, mass electrification will require additional investment in generation, transmission, distribution and charging infrastructure. These pressures could eventually result in changes to electricity tariffs, taxation, road-user charges or other mechanisms for recovering public revenue.

There is presently no sufficient evidence to state that the government is deliberately concealing future electricity-price increases until electric vehicles become common. Such an assertion would go beyond what can be established. It is nevertheless reasonable to recognise that the economics of transportation can change when the underlying energy system changes. Consumers should therefore distinguish between the current cost advantage of electric mobility and the long-term cost of operating an increasingly electrified transportation system. The price of electricity, like the price of petroleum, is ultimately shaped by production costs, infrastructure, taxation, regulation and government policy.

The Environmental Question We Should Really Be Asking

The electric vehicle should therefore be understood as part of a wider transformation of transportation rather than as an inherently clean object. Its environmental advantage comes primarily from the much greater efficiency of electric propulsion and from the possibility of progressively supplying that propulsion with lower-carbon electricity. The advantage is substantial in many life-cycle assessments, but it does not erase the environmental costs associated with mineral extraction, battery manufacturing, electricity generation, vehicle production, road use and end-of-life processing.

The meaningful environmental question is consequently not whether an electric vehicle is “green” and a petrol vehicle is “dirty”. Such descriptions reduce a complex life-cycle calculation to the technology displayed on the vehicle’s badge. The relevant question is how much environmental damage is associated with producing, powering, operating and ultimately disposing of each vehicle over its useful life. That calculation must account for the battery, the electricity source, the size and weight of the vehicle, the distance it travels, the longevity of its components and the effectiveness of recycling.

The electric vehicle can therefore play an important role in reducing the environmental burden of transportation, but the transition should not be treated as the end of the environmental discussion. It is a change in the structure of energy consumption, material extraction and transportation economics. In India’s case, it is also a strategic attempt to reduce dependence on imported petroleum and increase the role of domestic energy resources. The environmental gains are significant, but they exist within a much larger economic and geopolitical transformation.

The charging socket is only one point in that system. The real environmental story begins with the extraction of minerals, continues through manufacturing and electricity generation, follows the vehicle throughout its useful life and ends with the treatment of its battery and other components. Only by examining that entire chain can the environmental consequences of electric mobility be understood without either exaggerating its benefits or dismissing them. The electric vehicle is not the environmental miracle that its marketing sometimes suggests, but neither is it the environmental failure that its critics sometimes claim. Its actual value can only be understood through the complete life-cycle of the vehicle, the energy system that powers it and the economic and strategic system that supports its adoption.

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In Short: Electric vehicles are not environmentally harmless simply because they produce no tailpipe emissions. Their environmental footprint begins with the extraction and processing of battery minerals, continues through energy-intensive manufacturing and electricity generation, and extends to tyre and road pollution, battery degradation and eventual recycling. At the same time, life-cycle studies show that battery-electric vehicles generally produce substantially lower greenhouse-gas emissions than comparable petrol and diesel vehicles over their full operating lives, particularly as electricity generation becomes cleaner. The real issue, therefore, is not whether electric vehicles are completely green or completely harmful, but how their total environmental cost compares with the alternatives. In India, the transition also has a strategic dimension because replacing petroleum with electricity can reduce dependence on imported crude oil and strengthen energy security. The electric vehicle is consequently neither the environmental miracle it is sometimes portrayed as nor the environmental failure its critics sometimes suggest. Its actual impact can only be understood by examining the entire chain from mineral extraction to manufacturing, electricity generation, use and eventual recycling.

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The Taboo Behind the “Smart City” Called Kakinada

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

When I got down in Kakinada in the early morning hours, I was expecting a rather difficult climate. Someone accustomed to the weather of a well-planned city like Mysuru rarely adjusts easily to most other Indian towns. Yet the heat and the air were gentler than I had anticipated. Perhaps a few years of living near Kerala’s coast had prepared me better than I realised. What I was not prepared for came later, as I walked towards the apartment where I was staying. I had to close my nostrils. There was no gradual build-up to it, no faint odour growing stronger with every step. It was simply there, all at once, the way a wall is there before you have decided to stop walking.

I did not think much of it that first morning. It was a new city, an unfamiliar lane, and perhaps an isolated problem. It was only a few days later, during an evening walk near the old Rangaraya Medical College with Dr Chandrashekhar, that the possibility of it being an isolated problem disappeared. A channel ran along the hospital boundary wall, carrying the same smell I had encountered on my first morning. Dr Chandrashekhar mentioned, almost without emphasis, that it had been running in much the same condition for as long as he could remember from his days as a student there. It was not a bad week or a bad season. It appeared to have become a permanent feature of the landscape, much like the old building itself.

That was enough to make me look beyond the particular lane and examine the administrative record behind what I was seeing. What emerged was a striking difference between the city described in official documents and the city experienced at street level.

What the Records Say

On paper, Kakinada Municipal Corporation presents a considerably different picture. The Andhra Pradesh State Portal has credited it with “exemplary waste management practices”, while the corporation has received national recognition under the Swachh Bharat Mission. Kakinada has also been part of the Government of India’s Smart Cities Mission for more than a decade. Initiatives such as “Return Gift” and “Legacy Waste Management” have been undertaken and publicly presented as evidence of the city’s continuing efforts towards urban improvement.

None of these claims is imaginary. The programmes exist, the recognitions exist and the expenditure associated with them can be traced through government records. The difficulty begins when that official picture is placed alongside the physical condition of parts of the city. A city may receive recognition for particular programmes and still have fundamental deficiencies in other areas of civic infrastructure. The question, therefore, is not whether Kakinada has achieved anything. It clearly has. The question is whether those achievements correspond to the conditions experienced by all sections of its population.

The Drainage Question

In several pockets of Kakinada, drainage channels function as open sewers, carrying wastewater along roads and residential settlements. In some places, families live only a few feet from them. The problem is particularly difficult to reconcile with the city’s Smart City status because Kakinada still does not have a functioning underground drainage system serving the city as a whole. More than a decade after its inclusion in the Smart Cities Mission, residents in substantial parts of the city continue to depend upon open drains that were designed primarily for storm-water disposal but have come to carry domestic wastewater as well.

The problem is therefore larger than the smell that first drew my attention to it. An open drain running beside a road may be dismissed as an ordinary feature of an Indian town, but the persistence of such a system in a city that has spent years within a national urban-modernisation programme raises a legitimate question about priorities, implementation and accountability. If underground drainage has long been recognised as necessary, why has the city continued to function without it for so many years?

When Infrastructure Becomes a Health Risk

The consequences of this deficit fall most heavily on the people who live closest to these channels. In several areas, low-income families live beside open drains, sometimes with infants and young children only a few feet from wastewater. Stagnant water and accumulated waste create conditions favourable to mosquito breeding and increase exposure to vector-borne diseases. The risks become particularly serious when drainage channels overflow during periods of heavy rainfall and contaminated water enters residential surroundings.

There is another vulnerability that receives less attention because it is not immediately visible. Where drinking-water pipelines run close to contaminated drainage channels, leakage or damage to either system can create the possibility of contamination. Municipal assessments have themselves identified the need to examine drinking-water pipelines in vulnerable areas. This is not a reason to predict a particular epidemic, but it is sufficient reason to regard the existing arrangement as a public-health concern requiring systematic inspection, monitoring and corrective action.

The people most exposed to these conditions are also often those with the least capacity to change them. A family living beside an open drain cannot simply move to another neighbourhood because the municipal infrastructure has failed. For a child growing up there, the drain is not an occasional civic inconvenience. It is part of the environment in which childhood takes place.

A Pattern Beyond the Drains

The drainage problem does not appear in isolation. Other aspects of Kakinada’s civic infrastructure reveal a similar distance between stated policy and conditions visible on the ground.

Despite years of sanitation campaigns, garbage remains visible along several suburban roads and thoroughfares. Where waste collection and decentralised processing do not function consistently, roadside accumulation and open burning become recurring problems. Irrigation canals that once formed an important part of the region’s agricultural landscape have, in stretches, become receptacles for solid waste and other pollutants. Traffic, damaged roads, construction activity and dust add another layer to the environmental burden.

Each of these problems can be assigned to a different department and explained as a local deficiency. Considered together, however, they raise a broader question about the way urban development is planned and measured. A city can produce successful projects, receive awards and report measurable improvements while significant parts of its population continue to live with infrastructure that should have disappeared decades ago.

This is where the idea of a Smart City becomes more complicated than a designation or a collection of projects. The quality of a city is ultimately experienced through its ordinary infrastructure: the water that reaches a household, the drainage that carries away its wastewater, the waste collected from its street, the air a child breathes and the roads people use every day.

Where Did the Investment Go?

The state’s recent approach to the Centre for approximately ₹200 crore under the Urban Infrastructure Development Fund for the construction of an underground drainage system in Kakinada makes the question more immediate. If approved and implemented, the funding could finally address one of the city’s most persistent infrastructure deficits. Yet the proposal inevitably raises another question: after more than a decade of Smart Cities Mission activity, alongside state municipal funding and sanitation programmes, why does Kakinada still require a fresh major intervention for infrastructure as fundamental as an underground drainage network?

That question is not, by itself, an allegation of financial wrongdoing. Establishing such a conclusion would require a detailed examination of financial and administrative records. But those records should be available for public scrutiny. How much has been sanctioned for Kakinada’s urban infrastructure during the past decade? How much has actually been released and spent? Which projects were approved, which were completed and which remain incomplete? What were their original estimates and revised costs? Which agencies were responsible for implementation and supervision? What explains the gap between projects announced and infrastructure actually delivered?

These are not unreasonable questions to ask of public institutions. They become particularly important when the physical condition of a city appears so different from the impression created by its official achievements. The answers should come from records rather than speculation, and responsibility should be established through those records rather than through political accusation.

What Accountability Requires

An independent sanitation and infrastructure audit would be an appropriate starting point. It should cover the city’s suburban and low-income settlements as well as the areas that receive greater visibility in official assessments, and it should be conducted independently of the municipal machinery whose performance is being examined. Its findings should be made publicly accessible, including the condition of drainage networks, waste-management systems, water pipelines and canal infrastructure.

The proposed underground drainage project should then have a transparent implementation schedule, with defined areas of coverage, expenditure, timelines and institutional responsibility. Progress should be measured not merely by administrative expenditure or project announcements but by the actual number of households connected to a functioning system.

The families already living along open drainage channels also cannot be treated as an incidental part of the infrastructure problem. Where rehabilitation becomes necessary, it should provide secure housing, sanitation, water supply and access to essential civic services rather than simply relocating people from one inadequate environment to another.

None of these demands is extraordinary. They are basic requirements of a city that wishes to describe itself as modern, sustainable and liveable. The issue is ultimately one of closing the distance between what has been promised, what has been reported and what residents actually experience.

The City Beyond the Smart City Tag

I am writing this from my balcony in Mysuru, days after returning from Kakinada, fresh from a nebulisation session that I now need each evening. Somewhere amid the smoke, dust and open drains of Kakinada, I developed a respiratory infection severe enough to require treatment. I cannot establish from my experience alone what caused it, and I do not intend to. My experience is simply the reason the environmental conditions I witnessed no longer remain an abstract matter for me. I was a visitor. I left. For many of the families I saw living beside those drains, particularly the children growing up there, these conditions are not something encountered during a short stay and left behind with the next train. They are part of everyday life.

Looking at a clearer sky from my balcony, I keep returning to the question of what a Smart City should actually mean. It cannot mean only the projects that appear in presentations, the awards displayed in offices or the statistics recorded in reports. A city is experienced at street level, beside the drains, along the roads, near the canals and inside the homes of the people who live there. A child’s access to clean air, clean water and basic sanitation should not depend on which municipal corporation happens to govern the street on which that child was born.

I hope this reaches the desks for which it is intended. I hope it is read as a record of what I saw, followed by questions that the responsible institutions can answer through facts and records. The purpose is not to condemn Kakinada. It is to ask whether the city that exists on paper is the same city in which its people are actually living.

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History of Rangaraya Medical College - an exclusive article

Rangaraya Medical College: A Legacy Carved in Community

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

Beyond the bustle of Kakinada’s evening traffic, I came upon a building that seemed to hold its ground with a kind of authority, old, weathered by decades, yet unmistakably dignified against the newer structures crowding the road around it. I was walking with Dr. Chandrashekhar, an MD student at the college, who had offered to show me around the campus. Until that walk, I had no real sense of the history sitting inside those walls, only a vague awareness that the institution had been there for a long time, the way most of us know a landmark exists without ever asking how it came to be.

It was already evening, well past the hours one would expect any real activity, and yet a number of people stood outside the hospital gates in scattered groups, waiting, talking quietly among themselves, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else. Something about that stillness, an old building holding a crowd of strangers even after its working hours had ended, stayed with me long enough that I went looking into its history once I was back home, curious to understand what this place had meant to the region before it meant anything to me.

Beginning that search, I assumed, the way most people would, that its history followed the predictable path of India’s legacy institutions, a wealthy king handing over a parcel of land, a government cutting a ribbon, or a single wealthy physician erecting a monument to his own name. What I found instead was something far more complex and worth telling properly, a story that deserves to be carried forward to the generations of students and patients who will walk these same corridors long after I have.

The genesis of RMC is an intricate mosaic of post-independence ambition, an unprecedented linguistic compromise in naming, an orphanage that moonlighted as a medical campus, and an intellectual lineage that stretches all the way to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s inner circle. To uncover the founding of Rangaraya Medical College is to explore a masterclass in community-led, private-sector resourcefulness that transformed coastal Andhra Pradesh for good.

The Problem of the Missing Physicians

To understand why RMC was built, one must look at the geography of the late 1950s. The newly carved state of Andhra Pradesh was grappling with a massive deficit of healthcare professionals. While elite medical colleges existed in cities like Visakhapatnam and Guntur, the fertile, densely populated Godavari districts lacked a dedicated medical training ground.

The idea to plug this gap did not originate in a bureaucratic office in New Delhi or Hyderabad. It was conceived by local visionaries who realised that if they waited for the state to build a medical college, a generation of students would lose out.

The initial spark came in 1955 from Dr. Mallavarapu Venkata Krishna Rao, a former Education Minister in the cabinet of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari during the era of the composite Madras State. Dr. Krishna Rao had the political foresight to know what it took to build an institution, but he needed structural and military-grade execution. He found his partner in Colonel Dr. Datla Satyanarayana Raju, known as Dr. D.S. Raju, a medical figure who had served as the personal doctor to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose during the Indian National Army trials and later became the Deputy Minister of Defence and Health under Jawaharlal Nehru.

Together, these two men decided that if the government could not immediately fund a public medical college in Kakinada, they would rally the public to build a private one.

April 2, 1958: The Historic Meeting at Pithapuram Road

The dream officially shifted from concept to reality on April 2, 1958. A meeting was convened in Kakinada at the residence of a prominent local citizen, Dr. Lakkaraju Subbarao. The gathering included Sri Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, then the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

The organisers faced a real hurdle. They had no land and no buildings to house a medical college, an enterprise that requires extensive laboratory and classroom space.

Stepping into this gap was the Maharajah of Pithapuram. In an act of philanthropy, he gave his consent to hand over an orphanage building complex he was running on Pithapuram Road. A space originally built to shelter and care for vulnerable children became the incubator for the region’s future doctors.

To formalise the community support gathering around them, the founders registered the Kakinada Medical Education Society on April 16, 1958. Its mandate was clear and ambitious in equal measure, open a fully functioning private medical college by July of that same year.

The Name: A Portrait of Gratitude

Perhaps the most striking element of RMC’s history is its name. In the mid-20th century, if a private citizen funded a college, the institution typically bore their exact name. RMC broke that convention through a gesture of gratitude from the Kakinada Medical Education Society.

As the society scrambled for seed capital, it received financial support from regional families, including Sri P.S. Raju, the Zamindar of Goteru. The larger breakthrough came from an industrialist from Tanuku, Sri Mullapudi Harischandra Prasad, representing the Sri Mullapudi Venkata Rayudu Memorial Educational Trust, who donated five lakh rupees, an extraordinary sum at the time.

Rather than allow the college to be named after him, Prasad deflected the honour. In response, the society crafted a portmanteau name that honoured Prasad’s own family lineage, drawing “Ranga” from his late brother-in-law, Sri Pendyala Sriramachandra Venkata Krishna Rangarao, the Zamindar of Dommeru, and “Raya” from his grandfather, Sri Mullapudi Venkatarayudu.

By fusing the memory of the brother-in-law and the grandfather, the society named the institution Rangaraya Medical College, a rare instance in Indian academic history of a college named not after the person who wrote the cheque, but as a multi-generational tribute to a donor’s family roots.

Overcoming the Lack of a Hospital

While the orphanage building was modified to host classrooms, anatomy halls, and basic laboratories, a medical college is functionally incomplete without a teaching hospital of real capacity. Building one from scratch would have taken years the society did not have.

The founders turned to the existing District Headquarters Hospital in Kakinada, a facility with its own history rooted in British colonial-era public health infrastructure. On October 14, 1959, after negotiation with the state, the Government of Andhra Pradesh officially notified the Kakinada District Headquarters Hospital as the formal teaching hospital attached to Rangaraya Medical College, bridging a privately funded college with a publicly managed clinical space, and giving students access to a wide and varied patient base from the outset.

The Haldane Connection

As RMC found its footing through the 1960s, it began attracting attention from unexpected quarters. Among the more remarkable chapters in its history involves the British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a polymath who renounced his British citizenship to become an Indian citizen and spent his final years working in the country.

Haldane developed a real respect for the grassroots medical movement taking shape in Kakinada. Before his passing in late 1964, he made his final request known, donating his body to the Pathology Department of Rangaraya Medical College for research and medical education. Haldane, who had famously written a poem on his own terminal illness, treating even his mortality as a final teaching tool, gave a regional medical college in coastal Andhra a striking form of validation, the mortal remains of one of the twentieth century’s most significant scientific minds.

The Shift to a State Institution

By the late 1970s, the financial burden of running a leading medical institution on private donations and subsidised fees had become unsustainable for the Kakinada Medical Education Society. To preserve the quality of education and allow the hospital infrastructure to scale with a growing population, the Government of Andhra Pradesh stepped in. In 1981, the state officially took over RMC, completing its transition from a private, society-run experiment into a premier government medical college.

A Legacy Carved in Community

Great institutions are rarely the work of a single force, and Rangaraya Medical College makes that case as clearly as any I have come across. It exists because an INA-connected physician, a former minister, a local landlord, an industrialist, and a Maharajah sat together in a living room on a spring afternoon and decided that the youth of the Godavari districts deserved better than what they had. The name on its façade does not represent a single ego. It represents a community’s way of saying thank you to a donor who asked for nothing in return, a piece of Kakinada’s own golden age of philanthropy, still standing, still treating patients, decades after the men who built it have passed on.

Walking out through those same gates that evening, I carried all of this history with me into the city outside. While returning, the streets of Kakinada were well lit. Beside the smell of the open drainage, people were already preparing to go to bed. I do not know how they manage to fall asleep so easily amid it all. Perhaps the chaos has simply become part of their life, absorbed so completely into the rhythm of the place that it no longer registers as chaos at all, only as home.

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In short: A quiet, weathered building near Kakinada’s evening traffic and a crowd of people waiting outside its gates after hours sent the author looking into the history of Rangaraya Medical College. What emerged was a remarkable story of post-independence community effort: an INA veteran physician, a former minister, a Maharajah who donated an orphanage building, and an industrialist who refused to have the college named after himself, choosing instead to honor his late brother-in-law and grandfather through its name. The piece traces the college’s journey from a privately funded 1958 experiment to a state-run institution, including its unlikely connection to British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who donated his body to its Pathology Department. It stands as a record meant to carry this history forward for generations of students and patients still to come.

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The Last Meeting Theory

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

As the ticket checker came to me and reconfirmed my name, I noticed a young man watching me from the berth across. Once the checker moved on, I let my face fall back into one of the books I had carried along for the long journey. I continued reading, though I could still feel him looking.

“Are you an author, sir?” he asked, after a while, moving closer to sit beside me. “I have seen the names of some of your books, and I went through your social media too.” Being recognised is a good thing, mostly, but the moment one starts placing popularity above peace, it turns into something heavier to carry. Whenever I travel, I choose the plainest clothes I own, since there is rarely anyone on these journeys I need to convince of anything.

I am still not entirely sure what made him open up the way he did, his life, his plans, and eventually, the concerns he had clearly been carrying somewhere deep for a long time. He spoke of a career he had chosen more out of family expectation than desire, a marriage he was still learning how to inhabit, and a restlessness he could not name even to himself. As I answered each thing he asked, I watched his eyes widen slightly, again and again. They were, in truth, questions offered back to him in a different shape, the kind that let a person reach their own answer rather than borrow someone else’s. I have found, over many years of these conversations, that most people already carry the answer they are looking for. What they lack is someone willing to sit across from them long enough for that answer to surface on its own.

A few hours later, his wife appeared and reminded him that his station was approaching. He rose slowly, began gathering his luggage, and as the train pulled in, he said goodbye and walked toward the door. It was only then that I noticed something unusual. We had never exchanged phone numbers. I had not even asked his name. He had not asked mine either.

This is not how these journeys usually end for me. If I were to go through the contacts saved on my phone, a great many of them would be people I first met exactly this way, on a train, mid conversation, somewhere between one station and another. Some of those meetings happened more than twenty five years ago, and the people from them are still close friends today, a few of them closer than that. I still remember the names of stations where such friendships began, the particular light coming through a train window, the small kindnesses exchanged over shared food, the addresses written by hand on torn pieces of paper before either of us owned a mobile phone. But this time, nothing. No name, no number, no promise to stay in touch. It was only afterward that a philosophy I had recently come across returned to me, one I had read but never truly felt settle into me until that moment. I have heard it called the Last Meeting Theory.

The theory holds a difficult truth. We never encounter the same thing twice, not even moments apart. Think of a river. I look at the water and say, this is the Ganga, or this is the Kaveri, and by the time the sentence has left my mouth, the water I named has already moved on, replaced by water that has never touched that stretch of riverbed before. The name stays. The river, in the only sense that actually matters, does not. This is not a poetic exaggeration. It is what a river actually is, a name we give to something that is never the same thing twice, moving continuously out from under the very word we use to hold it still. A philosopher in ancient Greece once said something close to this, that no one steps into the same river twice, since new waters are always flowing toward him. Long before that, our own sages spoke of anicca, the truth that nothing holds its form for even one full breath, that permanence itself is the illusion, not the exception.

Everything we think we return to carries this same betrayal. A flower noticed on a morning walk, admired in passing, may not exist by the time the same path is walked again, the plant itself gone, the ground beneath it changed, nothing left to mark where it once stood. Even a photograph, which we imagine holds a moment still, only holds the light that fell on a face that no longer exists in that exact arrangement, since the person in it has aged, however slightly, in every second since the shutter closed. We rarely think of any of this as loss, because we were never asked to say goodbye to it. It simply was, and then, at some point we did not witness, it was not.

Apply this to a person, and something in the chest tightens, the way it does with any truth we would rather not have named so plainly. Every person we meet, we meet exactly once, in the fullest sense of that word. The version of them sitting across from us on a particular afternoon, in a particular mood, carrying a particular set of concerns they may never carry again in that combination, will not exist in that form the next time we see them, if there is a next time at all. We meet people again, certainly, the same name, the same face, often the same affection. But we never meet the same meeting twice. Every conversation, however ordinary it feels, carries the possibility that it is the only one of its kind we will ever have with that person, whether or not we ever see them again in body.

This truth does not confine itself to strangers on trains. It lives inside the people we see every day, the ones we assume, wrongly, will always be available to us in exactly the shape we left them. A parent answering the phone this evening is not the same parent who answered it a year ago, a little more tired now, a little more given to repeating themselves, a year closer to an ending none of us like to name aloud. A child running through the house at this particular age, with this particular laugh and these particular questions about the world, will be gone within months, replaced by an older child who has already forgotten the exact way they once said certain words. We assume familiarity protects us from this, that because we will see these people again tomorrow, today’s version of them does not matter as urgently as a stranger glimpsed once on a journey. The truth runs the other way. It is precisely because we assume endless further meetings with the people closest to us that we so rarely give any single one of those meetings our full attention, and it is precisely the stranger, met once and never again, who sometimes receives the fuller version of our presence, simply because we knew, without needing a theory to tell us, that this was all the time we would ever have.

I did not truly understand this until that afternoon on the train, watching a stranger walk toward a door, realising only as it closed behind him that I would very likely never see him again, not because life had conspired to keep us apart, but because neither of us had done the ordinary thing people do to ensure otherwise. There was no tragedy in it. There was, suddenly, a window into something true of every meeting, whether we notice it or not, one that most of us pass through a thousand times in a lifetime without ever pausing long enough to look through it properly.

As the train continued its journey, I began watching the people who boarded and got off at each stop differently. I smiled at them. I let whatever love I could offer in a glance actually reach them, because I would very likely never see any of them again in this lifetime.

The train stopped at the station early in the morning. A few people were still asleep on the benches along the platform. Others were already walking briskly toward the exit. As I walked toward the gate myself, I tried to hold on to their faces a moment longer than usual. These were strangers I would likely never see again. Without either of us knowing it in advance, this had been our last meeting.

If we looked at every person, every place, every ordinary thing around us, as though we were seeing it for the last time, something in us would change completely. We would stop hurrying past what we barely notice now. We would begin looking at everything, and everyone, with all the love we have. Let it be the most bleoved one in front of you!

_____________________________________________________________________

In short: A chance conversation with a stranger on a train, one where neither exchanged a name or a number, becomes the entry point into a philosophy the author calls the Last Meeting Theory. Drawing on the impermanence of a river, a flower, even a photograph, and echoing both Heraclitus and the Buddhist concept of anicca, the piece argues that every meeting with another person, however familiar, may be the only one of its kind, since the version of them present in that moment will never exist in quite that form again. It extends this beyond strangers to parents and children, the people we wrongly assume will always be available to us unchanged, and closes with a simple shift: looking at everyone and everything as though it were being seen for the last time.

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Thirty-Six Hours to Kakinada: What Indian Railways Still Owes Its Passengers

1 Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

I was genuinely excited for this journey, the first long distance train trip I had made in years. There was a particular nostalgia in it too, a return to the era when the train, not the flight, was how a real journey felt. And this time the destination sharpened that excitement further. I was travelling to the state where I was born, decades ago, a place I had not returned to by rail in a very long time.

The train was scheduled for 5.05 in the evening. I reached the station by 4, only to learn it had been delayed by five hours, now expected at 10.05. Rather than sit at the station for six hours, I took a taxi back home and returned around 9.30, giving myself enough time to settle before boarding. It was only after I was back at the station that I heard the next announcement. The train would now arrive at 1.15 in the morning. I was carrying heavy luggage, and the idea of going home a second time and coming back again for a third made no sense. So I sat, at the station, for the hours that followed, and waited for a train that kept moving further away from the time I had planned my entire evening around. Since the day I booked, I have received a number of emails and messages from Indian Railway asking me if I need extra services, meals etc. I wonder why couldn’t they just send a message when the train was recheduled.

When it finally arrived and stopped, cleaning staff came aboard for a few minutes, going through motions that looked more like a performance of cleaning than the act itself. The compartment doors opened to very few passengers in Second AC. What greeted me inside was, without exaggeration, one of the worst coaches I have travelled in. Small insects, cockroach-like, moved along the berths and walls with no particular urgency, as though they, too, had come to expect this coach as their own. At some point during the journey, a mouse appeared, unhurried, crossing the floor of a coach I had paid a premium fare to travel in. This was Second AC, one of the higher tiers of Indian Railways travel, leaving aside Vande Bharat and its separate category entirely. I found myself wondering, seriously, what condition the sleeper and general compartments further down the same train must have been in, if this was what greeted a paying AC passenger. The coach itself, I noticed, was split down the middle, First AC on one side, Second AC on the other, sharing the same tired structure.

I do not fully know how I managed to sleep that night, given how far behind schedule the train already was and continued to fall. Tea, or anything resembling regular service, was rare, noticeably more so than on other trains I have taken. Through the night and into the following day, I watched the train pull into station after station, not to let passengers on or off, but simply to wait, stationary, while other trains were given priority to pass.

By early afternoon the next day, a middle aged co-passenger began walking the length of the compartment in visible panic. It emerged that his bag, containing his laptop, his essential documents, his cards, and the keys to his own home, had gone missing. He had been running a high fever through the journey and had fallen asleep with the bag kept close beside him, the way any exhausted, unwell traveller reasonably would. I remembered the train’s last stop, and a few passengers moving through the compartment around that time. Watching him search, increasingly certain of what had happened, was difficult to witness. I found myself quietly checking my own belongings, making sure everything I had brought was still where I had left it. No police official came to the compartment, not once, in the hours that followed. The entire episode ended exactly where these things usually end in this country, a complaint lodged over the telephone, filed into a system that, by every indication, would take it nowhere.

After roughly thirty six hours from departure to arrival, a journey that should have taken a fraction of that time, I reached Kakinada. The compartment, by then, was almost entirely empty.

I have read, like most Indians have, a great deal about the transformation supposedly underway in Indian Railways, the new trains, the modernised stations, the promise of a railway system finally catching up to the country it serves. I am not asking for that transformation to happen overnight. No reasonable person expects an institution this large to change in a season. But there is a difference between not yet having achieved excellence and failing, repeatedly, at the most basic things a paying passenger is owed. A clean coach without insects and rodents is not an aspiration. It is a baseline. What I experienced falls well short of even that baseline, in a class of travel positioned as one of the more comfortable options available.

Consider, then, what the general compartments carry, the ones I did not travel in but could only imagine after seeing my own. Passengers packed in with barely room to breathe, let alone sit comfortably for a journey of any real length. Toilets in those compartments that, by every account I have heard from others who have endured them, are conditions that would turn most stomachs on sight. If this is what a Second AC passenger is handed, I do not need much imagination to guess at what a general compartment traveller, who is very often the passenger with the least means to absorb such treatment, is left to endure.

And then there is security, or rather, its complete absence. A man loses his laptop, his cards, the very keys to his home, on a moving train he paid to travel on safely, and not a single official appears to even acknowledge it in person. The response is a phone number and a complaint that vanishes into a system with no accountability attached to it. Forget the bag. If a passenger loses something far more serious than belongings on that train, the response, I suspect, would look identical, a complaint registered, and nothing that follows it.

We have all heard the railway’s standard line by now, the inconvenience is regretted. I would like to ask, plainly, who is regretting what, exactly. Who compensates me for the taxi rides back and forth to a station that kept moving its own departure time by the hour. Who accounts for the time lost, an entire extra day and more of a finite life that no government, however efficient it eventually becomes, can ever hand back to a person once it is spent. I paid a real fare for this journey, priced as a premium class of travel. What, precisely, did that fare purchase. If it was not comfort, not safety, not punctuality, and not even basic cleanliness, I am left asking a simple question the railway owes every passenger an honest answer to: was this a fare, or simply a donation, handed over in exchange for nothing resembling the service it was meant to buy.

I stepped off the train at Kakinada in the early hours of the morning, the platform still half asleep, the air carrying that particular stillness only a very early morning arrival has. Thirty six hours after I had first reached the station in Mysore, filled with the excitement of a journey home, I was finally standing in the state where my life had begun, tired in a way that had very little to do with the actual distance travelled, and everything to do with everything that stood between the two points on the map.

In short: A long-awaited train journey from Mysore to Kakinada, meant to revive the nostalgia of travel by rail, turned into a 36-hour ordeal. A nine-hour delay, a filthy Second AC coach with cockroaches and a mouse, near-absent food service, and a fellow passenger whose laptop and house keys were stolen with no police response at all, only a phone complaint that led nowhere. The piece argues that despite years of railway PR about modernisation, the most basic passenger expectations, cleanliness, security, and punctuality, remain unmet, and asks plainly what a premium fare is actually paying for if not these.

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Whispers Between the Lines: The Beauty of Rising Again

Leave a Comment / Articles / Dr Janatha Ramanathan

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. — Confucius

Life has a way of testing us when we least expect it. Just when everything seems to be falling into place, an unexpected setback can change the course of our lives. A cherished dream may crumble, a trusted relationship may falter, a career may take an unforeseen turn, or an illness may interrupt plans we have carefully made. In such moments, it is natural to ask, “Why me?” Perhaps, however, a more meaningful question is, “What can this experience teach me?”

Every life, no matter how successful it appears from the outside, carries unseen battles. Behind a smile may lie disappointment, silent tears, uncertainty, or a struggle that no one else knows about. Yet our difficulties do not have to define us. What matters is how we respond to them and how we allow them to make of us.

Consider the bamboo plant. For years, it grows quietly beneath the surface, strengthening its roots while showing little visible progress. To an impatient observer, it may seem that nothing is happening. Suddenly, it rises with remarkable speed. Its visible growth is possible because of the invisible foundation it patiently built for a long time.

Our lives often follow the same pattern. There are times when we feel unnoticed, unsuccessful, or left behind. We compare our journey with that of others and wonder whether our efforts are making a difference. But growth is not always visible. Some of life’s most important work takes place quietly within us, building patience, wisdom, resilience, and character. What feels like a season of waiting may actually be a season of preparation.

Failure, too, is not the opposite of success. It is often part of the journey towards it. Every mistake teaches us something that success may never reveal. Every disappointment can reshape our perspective, while every closed door may quietly redirect us towards a path we are not prepared to see before.

Think of a child learning to ride a bicycle. The child falls repeatedly, yet every fall teaches balance, courage and determination. If the child gave up after the first fall, the joy of riding would never be known. Life asks the same of us. Falling is natural. Rising again is a choice.

Resilience does not mean pretending to be strong all the time. It means allowing ourselves to feel pain without allowing pain to determine our future; knowing when to rest, seek help, and when to gather the courage to take another step. True strength is not found in never breaking; it is found in learning how to rebuild.

Perhaps someone reading this is carrying a burden that no one else knows about. If that is you, remember this: you have already survived every difficult day that has come before this one. The courage that carried you then, still lives within you now. Trust it. Nurture it. Let it guide you forward.

As you step into this new week, do not be afraid of life’s storms. They may bend you, but they can also strengthen your roots. Every challenge you overcome becomes part of your story-a story that may one day give someone else the courage to keep going.

Life is not about never falling. It is about discovering, again and again, the quiet strength to rise.

Reflection of the Week: The strongest people are not those who never face storms, but those who learn to dance in the rain while still looking for the sunrise.

Until next week, hold on to hope, believe in your inner strength, and remember: every sunrise is proof that darkness never has the final word, and every new beginning is an invitation to rise again.

Dr. Janatha Ramanathan

About the Author

Dr. Janatha Ramanathan is a poet, critic, translator, short story writer and columnist, and Associate Professor of English at Sree Ayyappa College for Women, Chunkankadai, Tamil Nadu. In two decades of teaching, she has published over eighty-five articles and presented ninety papers at national and international platforms, with particular scholarly focus on South African Literature.

She is Founder and Chief Editor of The Daffodils – An International Journal of Literature, Language and Criticism, and has edited seven anthologies of academic research and four poetry collections. Her own works, including her debut collection A Bundle of Joy, engage deeply with Indian, African American and Subaltern literatures.

Her honours include the Most Influential Women Award 2021 from the Writers Capital Foundation, Athens, and the Best Researcher Award from the University of Malaya, Malaysia.

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A Journey to Hometown: When Your Phone Knows You Before You Know Yourself

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

“Best route from Mysore to Kanhangad by road.”

That was all I typed into the search bar, sitting at my desk a few days before my father’s death anniversary, planning to make the journey alone this year, on my Royal Enfield Classic, along the hilly stretches of the highway. My children could not join me this time, examinations had claimed their attention instead, and some part of me had already made peace with performing this year’s rituals by myself.

The search results came back the way they always do, distances, road conditions, a landslide advisory near one ghat section. I was about to close the tab when I kept reading.

“Travelling on your RE Classic would suit this route well. Before you set out, make sure you renew your insurance policy, which is due to expire on the fifth of September. Also ensure you’re using a reliable helmet.”

I sat back from the screen for a moment. I had never mentioned which vehicle I owned in that search, or in any search that day. I had, months earlier, sent a complaint email to a customer care department about a fault in my helmet. And yes, my insurance was, in fact, due to lapse on exactly that date.

I had not asked it any of this. It had simply already known.

I have been fortunate, if that is the right word, to live through several distinct eras of human life. An era before telephones or computers existed in any home I knew. An era of ordinary mobile phones, simple, functional, entirely under my own control. And now, this era, one in which artificial intelligence appears to be quietly absorbing everything around it, including details about my own life I do not remember ever having handed over so plainly.

That moment on the road to Kanhangad stayed with me, and it made me think seriously, not with fear exactly, but with real curiosity, about where this is actually heading. If a search engine can already know which motorcycle I ride and when my insurance expires, what does a phone even remain, five or ten years from now. I do not think the answer is more apps, or faster processors, or sharper cameras. I think the phone, as an object we hold and unlock and scroll through, is quietly approaching the end of its own relevance, and something else entirely is taking its place.

Consider what is already technically possible today, even if not yet fully assembled into one seamless experience. A system that knows your calendar, your location, your vehicle, your health records, your spending habits, your relationships, and your habitual patterns of behaviour, closely enough to anticipate a need before you have consciously formed the question yourself. We are, I think, moving toward a world where the phone stops being a device you actively use and becomes something closer to a standing presence in your life, an assistant that has already read the room before you walk into it.

Picture something more concrete. You wake up, and before you have reached for anything, a voice in your ear or a projection on a lens has already noted that your father’s death anniversary falls in ten days, that the route you took last year had a landslide warning near a particular ghat section, that your bike is due for a service, and that your insurance, this time, has already been renewed automatically because you gave it permission to do so six months ago. It does not wait for you to ask a question. It has already anticipated the journey, the ritual, the logistics beneath it, and quietly cleared every obstacle before you have finished your morning tea.

This is not simply a smarter phone in your pocket. It is closer to a continuous companion, one that may not even require a screen at some point, delivered instead through an earpiece, a pair of glasses, or eventually something closer to a subtle interface with the body itself. The phone as a rectangle of glass we tap and swipe may come to look, to future generations, the way a rotary telephone looks to a child today, a quaint, clumsy ancestor of something that eventually became invisible, folded so completely into daily life that it stopped needing to be held at all.

Extend that thought further, into the parts of life we currently manage through a dozen separate apps and a great deal of quiet anxiety. Health, for instance. A future assistant would not wait for you to notice a symptom and search for it in a panic at midnight. It would already know, from years of accumulated data, your sleeping pattern, your heart rate on ordinary days versus stressful ones, the subtle change in your gait as you crossed a room, that something had shifted before you yourself had consciously registered it. It might simply say, one morning, that your recovery metrics over the past week suggest you should see a doctor about your blood pressure, not because you asked, but because it had been watching the pattern build for months and finally crossed a threshold worth mentioning.

Or consider money, an area where most of us make our worst decisions while our judgement is at its weakest, tired, emotional, or simply distracted. An assistant woven this deeply into daily life would not just track your spending after the fact. It would negotiate on your behalf, quietly comparing insurance renewals across providers before your policy lapses, flagging a subscription you forgot you were paying for, or gently declining an impulsive late night purchase by asking, plainly, whether you still wanted to proceed given what it already knew about your monthly commitments. Some of this exists in fragments today. What is coming is the version where none of it feels like a separate tool at all, simply one continuous, watchful presence.

Work, too, would change shape. Rather than opening five applications to prepare for a single meeting, you would simply be handed, unprompted, a short briefing the moment you sat down, drawn from every relevant email, document, and prior conversation, without you having to ask a single question to assemble it. Even grief and memory, the very thing that took me to Kanhangad in the first place, might be quietly assisted in ways that feel almost tender. An assistant that remembers, without being told twice, the date of your father’s passing, the specific rituals your family follows, the names of relatives you only see once a year at this gathering, and gently prepares you for all of it in advance, the way a thoughtful relative might, if that relative also happened to know everything about you that a phone now does.

There is a genuine convenience in this future, one I would be dishonest to deny. A world where I never again have to remember an insurance renewal date, where a journey like mine to Kanhangad is supported at every turn by something that already knows the roads, the risks, and the rituals waiting at the end of it, is in many ways a kinder world to grow old in. For someone travelling alone, as I was, to perform something as significant as a father’s death anniversary, having a system that gently ensures nothing practical goes wrong is not a small comfort.

But the same moment that unsettled me on that road is the moment that deserves the most honest scrutiny as this future arrives. Knowing my vehicle, my insurance date, and my old complaint about a helmet is not, on its own, a small parlour trick. It means a system somewhere has assembled a working model of my life that I did not explicitly consent to in any conscious sense, stitched together from fragments I gave away in a hundred separate, forgettable moments. As phones evolve into something closer to full personal assistants, the real question stops being what they can do for us, and becomes how much of ourselves we are willing to have known, catalogued, and predicted by something we did not build and cannot fully see inside of.

I suspect the honest answer is that most of us will trade a great deal of that privacy for the convenience, the way most of us already have, one small permission at a time, without ever making a single dramatic decision to do so. The phone that becomes a true personal assistant will not arrive with an announcement. It will arrive exactly the way it did for me on that ride to Kanhangad, quietly, inside an answer I had not fully asked for, about a life it already seemed to know better than I expected it to.

I still made that journey on my own motorcycle, along those hilly highway stretches, to perform rituals that have not changed in generations, for a father who lived in none of these eras at all. Perhaps that is the real balance worth striving for as this future arrives. Let the machine anticipate the insurance dates and the helmet reminders. Some things, the weight of a ritual performed alone on that winding road, the memory of a father, the particular silence of that kind of grief, are still worth carrying ourselves, un-assisted, exactly as they have always been carried.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

In short: A routine search for directions from Mysore to Kanhangad returned something unsettling, details about the author’s motorcycle, insurance expiry date, and a past helmet complaint, none of which had ever been typed into the search. That moment becomes the starting point for a broader look at where phones are actually headed: not smarter apps, but an ambient, continuous personal assistant woven into health, finance, work, and even grief and memory. The piece weighs the genuine convenience of this future against the real cost, a system that knows us more intimately than we consented to, and closes by asking how much of ourselves we’re willing to have known, catalogued, and predicted by something we didn’t build.

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Whispers Between the Lines: When the Heart Learns to Carry

Leave a Comment / Articles / Dr Janatha Ramanathan

Grief is the price we pay for love. – Queen Elizabeth II

There are moments when life falls strangely silent, not because the world has stopped, but because someone we love has suddenly disappeared from it.

The morning still arrives. The breeze moves through the trees. Voices rise and fall around us. The clock continues its quiet journey. Everything remains almost unchanged, and yet, within us, nothing is quite the same.

Grief has a way of altering the ordinary. A familiar room feels different. A photograph becomes a conversation. A name can bring both comfort and pain. The smallest memory can suddenly open a door to a world that once felt complete.

Some losses come without warning, leaving us with questions that have no answers and a silence that words cannot fill. We continue with our daily lives because life expects us to. We wake, work, speak and smile. Yet somewhere within us, a part of the heart remains at the moment when everything changed.

This reflection comes from such a place, from the grief following the sudden and heart breaking loss of a beloved younger brother.

When a relationship has been woven through childhood and growing years, its absence can feel impossible to comprehend. Shared meals, laughter, quarrels, games and countless ordinary moments become precious memories. We rarely recognise their value while we are living them. Only later do we understand that the ordinary was, in fact, extraordinary.

Perhaps that is one of grief’s deepest lessons: we often discover the worth of a moment only after it has become a memory. Yet grief is not merely sorrow. It is love searching for a new place to live.

The person may no longer be physically present, but love remains; in photographs, stories, familiar places, remembered laughter and quiet moments of reflection. Healing does not mean forgetting. It means learning to carry what cannot be changed.

Grief also teaches us the importance of kindness. A gentle word, a thoughtful message, a listening ear or simply sitting beside someone in silence can offer immense comfort. Those who remain present during another person’s darkest hours leave a lasting imprint.

At the same time, loss can reveal unexpected absences. Sometimes we hope certain people will notice our pain, ask how we are, or simply pause to acknowledge that something has changed. When they do not, disappointment can deepen the loneliness. Yet perhaps grief teaches us not to measure love by expectations, but to recognise with gratitude those who genuinely show up.

Time may not erase grief, but it can teach us to live alongside it. There will be songs, places, festivals, photographs and familiar scents that unexpectedly bring memories back. Tears may return. That is not failure. Sometimes tears are simply another language of love.

The heart can hurt and still hope. It can remember and still live. It can carry sorrow and still discover moments of joy. Perhaps strength begins not in forgetting, but in carrying the memories, the love, laughter and the lessons forward.

Reflection of the Week

We do not heal by forgetting those we love. We heal by learning to carry their love differently.

If you are grieving, be gentle with yourself. Grief has no timetable. Take one day at a time, one breath at a time. Let love remain larger than loss.

Until next week, may we remember: some bonds are not broken by death; they simply become invisible and continue to live quietly within the heart.

Dr. Janatha Ramanathan

About the Author

Her honours include the Most Influential Women Award 2021 from the Writers Capital Foundation, Athens, and the Best Researcher Award from the University of Malaya, Malaysia.

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Should Teachers Still Prioritise Handwriting Over Typing Skills?

Should We Still Be Proud of Good Handwriting?

Leave a Comment / Articles / Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

“Tara has a very good handwriting,” her teacher told me, as I left my daughter at the school gate.

I have not actually seen Tara’s handwriting. What I have noticed is her interest in the English language and in expressions. On our short journeys together, I often hear her trying out some difficult word she has been reading, sounding it out, then asking me if she got it right. A great deal of that credit belongs to Ms Karen, a good friend of mine, an Anglo-Indian and the principal of the school where Tara studies, whose own ease with the language has clearly found its way into how Tara has come to hold it. But the compliment somehow did not make me smile.

It should have. A parent is supposed to smile at that sentence. Instead I found myself asking a question the teacher had not asked and probably had no reason to: good handwriting, measured against what, useful for what. Tara is not failing at anything. But I am no longer certain that handwriting is the thing worth measuring, at least not the way we still measure it.

What the Research Actually Shows

I want to be careful here, because the stronger version of this argument is wrong. Handwriting in the first year or two of school does something typing does not. A child who traces the shape of a letter with her own hand builds a memory of that letter that a child tapping a key does not build in the same way. Several studies on early literacy support this, and children taught to write by hand in their earliest years tend to recognise letters and begin reading sooner than children taught primarily on a keyboard.

There is also the often-cited research on note-taking, which found that university students who wrote lecture notes by hand remembered the material better than students who typed the same notes. I know this research well, and I do not think it settles the question the way it is usually made to settle it. Later attempts to repeat those note-taking findings have produced mixed results, and a study about university students taking lecture notes tells us very little about what a ten-year-old gains from another year of cursive drills in the fourth or fifth grade. Even so, the early literacy findings deserve to be taken seriously, and I have no interest in arguing them away to make a tidier case.

What concerns me is everything after those first two years. Cursive continues to be drilled, penmanship continues to be graded, and handwriting continues to be treated as a skill worth refining well past the point where its early benefits have already been collected. This is the stretch I keep returning to when I speak with teachers, and I have said the same thing to rooms of them that I am saying here: the hours spent perfecting a cursive loop in the fourth grade are hours not spent on the skill that child will actually use for the rest of her life, which is typing.

What Is Already Changing Elsewhere

Some school systems have already started to act on this, in their own way. A number of American states quietly dropped their cursive requirements over the last decade, only to have some of them reinstated after parents and legislators pushed back, less on the evidence than on a feeling that something was being lost. Finland, which is looked to often enough in these conversations, moved years ago toward teaching keyboarding earlier and treating cursive as optional rather than compulsory.

None of these decisions were made lightly, and none of them were made without argument on both sides. But they suggest that the question I am asking here is not a private worry of mine, and not particular to one country’s classrooms either. It is being asked, unevenly and with different answers, in school systems far from Tara’s, by people who have looked at the same evidence and reached different conclusions about how much of it to act on and how quickly.

What Children Are Actually Being Prepared For

Think about what Tara, and every child like her, is being prepared for. She will sit exams on a computer before she finishes school, in most systems already moving that way. She will apply for everything she wants, college seats, scholarships, her first job, through forms that reward speed and accuracy at a keyboard. She will write, correspond, and think through a keyboard for almost all of her working life, and the fluency she builds in that skill compounds every year she has it, the way any skill practiced early becomes effortless later, requiring no conscious attention at all.

Her cursive, by comparison, will be tested by almost nothing beyond a signature, and even that is disappearing from more transactions every year as digital verification replaces it. Continuing to grade penmanship well into adolescence is not really about tradition, or at least not only about tradition. It is inertia, a curriculum built for a world that has already changed shape while the timetable stayed the same, and inertia on its own has never been a good enough reason to keep doing anything.

What I Tell Teachers Instead

What I tell teachers instead is straightforward, even if school systems built around old habits find it hard to act on. Start keyboarding earlier, and treat it as a measured skill the way reading fluency is measured, not as a once-a-week visit to a computer lab that exists apart from the rest of the school day. Let typing speed and accuracy matter the way spelling already matters, tracked the same way, supported the same way when a child falls behind.

Bring digital tools into ordinary classwork across every subject, geography, mathematics, language, instead of keeping them cordoned off in a separate period called computer class, as though technology were something a child visits rather than something she already lives inside every hour she is not in school. None of this means dropping handwriting instruction in the early years, where it earns its place and where I would defend it against anyone who tried to remove it. It means letting go of the idea that more handwriting practice, indefinitely extended, keeps paying the same returns it paid when a child was six.

I think of the teachers I have spoken to in these sessions, many of whom agree in the room and then go back to classrooms where the timetable, the exam board, and the parents expect cursive worksheets regardless of what anyone in the room believes about typing. Changing a curriculum is slower than changing a mind, and I do not underestimate how much slower. Textbooks have already been printed, exam formats have already been fixed years in advance, and a teacher who wants to spend an extra hour a week on keyboarding is often the same teacher being asked to cover a syllabus that has not made room for it. But somebody has to keep asking the question out loud, in rooms full of the people who set the timetable, or the timetable simply repeats itself for another generation because nobody interrupted it.

I still do not know what I will do with the compliment the teacher gave me at the gate. I will probably let Tara keep it, since the hours she has put into her handwriting are real, whatever else is true about the world she is growing into, and a child’s effort deserves to be named even when a parent is quietly asking himself harder questions about what that effort was for.

But I noticed, walking away from that gate, that I was more interested in what she was reading aloud on our last walk home, the words she was still learning to trust herself with, than in how neatly she had written any of it down. If I had to choose, today, which of the two to spend more of her school hours on, I already know which one I would choose. I am simply not sure the timetable has caught up with me yet.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

In Short: A conversation with his daughter’s teacher about her excellent handwriting leads the author to question whether schools still emphasise penmanship well past the age where it serves any developmental purpose, at the expense of typing and digital fluency children will actually need for the rest of their lives.

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Whispers Between the Lines: The Strength of Kindness

Reflection of the Week

Sometimes, kindness is not about changing someone’s life; it is simply about reminding them that they do not have to face a difficult moment alone.

Until next week, let us remember: when someone falters, do not merely walk away, but pause. Sometimes, your kindness may become the very strength they need to take their next step.

Dr. Janatha Ramanathan

About the Author

Her honours include the Most Influential Women Award 2021 from the Writers Capital Foundation, Athens, and the Best Researcher Award from the University of Malaya, Malaysia.

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