By all accounts, 2024 was a dark year of disappointments and loss. And yet, light flickered in through the cracks. Prominent people, veteran journalists and The Wire’s employees make a quick note of all that was good in 2024.
Geetanjali Shree, author
The AQI in Delhi came down from ‘hazardous’ to ‘very poor’!
Aathira Perinchery, environment reporter, The Wire
I decided to not shy away from the stage and participated in a panel discussion on climate change and security issues, and also moderated another. Both went great! And this year I also scheduled my first video interview – which had to be refurbished as a podcast because my interviewee’s internet was bad. But I got encouraging comments for that effort and I felt – well, relieved: that I do have it in me.
Aruna Roy, activist and former civil servant
The fact that T.M. Krishna was given the Sangita Kalanidhi M.S. Subbulakshmi Award for musical excellence by the Music Academy in Chennai.
Omar Rashid, correspondent
I met my cat in 2024. And I have never had a single day’s peace or a meal by myself. I wanted to name him something grand or socially outrageous, but eventually we both settled for Chutku, meaning the little one.
Kavita Kabeer, writer and activist
I could scale Cracknomics, a short video series, to a longer programme with the Wire!
Saba Naqvi, journalist
This year, I realised that no matter how bad things look here at times, the world is on a right-wing curve and it’s worse in many places. Imagine Donald Trump will soon be the most powerful guy in the world inspire of sexual harassment and huge corruption charges!
Karan Thapar, veteran journalist
The piece of good news in 2024 actually happened 18 days earlier in December 2023, on the 12th of that month, but it’s so close to 2024 that, for me, it counts as the best news for 2024. This was the birth of my nephew Vikram’s daughter Ayla. I have just attended her first birthday in Abu Dhabi, where she lives with her parents and brother.
Vani Vasudevan, veteran publisher
Aitong, a young elephant our family had adopted at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Kenya, was restored to the wild again this year. Orphaned when she was just two weeks old, she sustained a life-threatening head injury during a stampede in 1994. She was patiently and lovingly nurtured back to health across the next twenty years and went on to become a wonderfully caring elephant herself, ready to help others in distress. She is now at large somewhere in the wild, where she belongs.
Aparna Bhattacharya, political analyst
BJP losing Ayodhya – the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency. That’s enough to live through a rather dark, disappointing year.
Tamanna Naseer, associate editor, The Wire English
Not having a degree in journalism has bothered me slightly at times. Last year, I enrolled in a postgraduate course in Mass Communication at IGNOU. I was overjoyed this December when I received my mark sheet and certificate, confirming that I had passed the exam and earned a post graduate diploma in mass communication.
Jehangir Ali, correspondent
I got shortlisted for an Oxford fellowship!
Pavan Korada, data analyst, The Wire
My 10-year-old nephew has taken an interest in math. He’s already fascinated by proofs and axioms. I’m thrilled to learn this, and I cannot wait to calculate the area under a curve between two points with him.
Sharmita Kar, assistant editor, The Wire English
The opposition grew stronger in parliament. It was a baby step for our democracy but at least it reinstated some faith.
Elisha Vermani, news producer, The Wire English
The anti-CAA protests in New Delhi in 2019 were the first protest movement I’d seen take shape in front of my eyes. It was heartwarming to see people come together against a divisive law but it was more heartwarming to see them come together under the nazm of a Pakistani poet – Hum Dekhenge by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. This year, I got the opportunity to meet his daughter and artist Salima Hashmi, and tell her this in a letter that she very sweetly made the time to respond to!
Saikat Majumdar, author
A difficult year was lit up by the filmmaker Anup Singh, director of Qissa and The Song of Scorpions, when he shared with me his completed screenplay of the film he is making based on my 2015 novel The Firebird, about a young boy’s complicated relation with his mother’s life as a theatre actress in Calcutta.
Deep Mukherjee, news producer, The Wire English
I bought a motorcycle, something that I had wanted for a long time.
Armanur Rahman, news producer, The Wire
Definitely joining The Wire.
Rohit Kumar, contributor, The Wire
To see that despite all the power of propaganda at its disposal, and its near complete control of most government agencies, the BJP still couldn’t manage a simple majority in the Lok Sabha elections. It showed me that much of India still believes in the values enshrined in the Constitution.
Banjot Kaur, health reporter, The Wire
My colleague and fellow reporter Sukanya Shantha achieved a rare feat in journalism. Her series of stories revealed how prisoners in Indian jails were assigned chores on the basis of their castes. A Scheduled Caste inmate would be asked to clean the floor and the toilets.
A bench led by former Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud delivered a landmark judgement that struck down this rule from the jail manuals and instructed that the caste column be removed from the prison registers.
Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, political editor, The Wire
Indians have a way of keeping its democracy at work all the time. When it felt that the Narendra Modi brand is unbeatable in Uttar Pradesh, given its absolute dominance in the state over the last decade, the electorate handed the BJP a resounding defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. Journalists scampered to look for a rational way of explaining such an outcome, but undoing all such explanations was the saffron party’s particularly humiliating loss in Ayodhya, the seat of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that also was at the top of BJP’s electoral priorities in the run-up to the polls. This unpredictability keeps us journalists always on our toes, and makes us love our profession despite all the risks involved in it.
