Hannah Arendt once observed, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

There are certain calamities that arrive with trumpets and earthquakes, and others that steal upon us like a soft and solitary draught beneath the door. The fading of empathy belongs to the latter. It does not announce itself with spectacle. It is rather the gentle recession of warmth from a room whose furnishings remain immaculate and undisturbed, a subtle cooling of the moral atmosphere while everything visible appears fixed in its accustomed place. And yet, somewhere beneath the polished surface, something vital has slipped out of reach.

Picture, if you will, a modest town—neither exceptionally charming nor especially troubled. Morning light touches the cobblestones; the smell of bread rises from the baker’s window; children hurry to lessons with the earnest energy of youth. Nothing is amiss. And yet, deep in the hidden chambers of human intercourse, a quiet erosion begins.

A woman misplaces her glove upon the pavement. Not long ago, someone would have hastened to restore it to her—almost instinctively, as one retrieves a child’s balloon before the wind carries it off. Today, a passerby pauses, weighs the inconvenience, and continues on his way. A man seated on a bench hears the weary sigh of the stranger beside him, but he does not lift his eyes from his newspaper. A shopkeeper observes the trembling hand of an elderly customer as she counts her coins, yet offers no word of ease or patient smile. Each omission is small—so small that no one would think to record it. But small neglects are how a great forgetting begins.

The real danger lies in the outward sameness of things. Empathy may depart, but no roof tiles shift to mark its absence. Doors open and close as they always have. It is entirely possible to live for quite some time in a civilisation that is quietly hollowing itself from within. The polite conventions remain; it is the soul of them that grows thin.

When empathy retreats, efficiency often steps forward to take its place. People grow competent but unkind, courteous but detached. They selve themselves into private enclosures where compassion is treated as an optional virtue—pleasant, perhaps, but not strictly necessary. And in that chill interior climate, Arendt’s warning becomes clear: the loss of empathy is not simply a personal failing but a structural crack in the great arch of civilisation.

For once a populace ceases to imagine the inward life of its neighbour, it becomes perilously ready to accept hardness as wisdom, indifference as order, cruelty as the unavoidable logic of the times. A society may descend into barbarism not by a dramatic plunge but by a slow descent—step by unremarkable step—until someone finally wonders, with a kind of startled sorrow, When did we cease to care for one another?

And yet the frost is not final. Hope remains wherever a single heart pauses before turning away, wherever one human soul recognises another as kin. Civilisation is upheld not by grand declarations but by the quiet, unwavering acts of charity that warm the world from within.

So I would ask you, friend and fellow traveller in this fragile age: what small gesture of human kindness passed through your week—either offered or received—and what faint yet steadfast promise did it carry of the world we might still become?

Tonight, as the lights of New York flicker against the winter sky, the city divides itself between jubilation and disbelief. Some will rejoice; others will mourn. For what has occurred is, by every measure, extraordinary: a thirty-three-year-old South Asian Muslim—a proud democratic socialist—has been elected Mayor of New York City.

Had any person, two short years ago, stood in a political forum and foretold this, they would have been dismissed with polite laughter, as one humoured for his naiveté. Yet the improbable, when driven by conviction and youth, has always been the secret rhythm of history. Was it not so when, in 2011, the cry Occupy Wall Street swept through the arteries of this same city, declaring war on greed and inequality? Or fifty years before that, when four students from a humble Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, quietly seated themselves at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and ignited the Civil Rights Movement?

Such uprisings share a single divine trait: they begin in obscurity, born not in boardrooms or parliaments but in the restless souls of the young. Without the sanction of elders or institutions, they seize the moral imagination of their generation long before even the most sympathetic commentators discern their meaning.

And so it is again. We stand within a moment whose full significance will only be grasped in hindsight—a moment that will reshape how we understand New York, America, and indeed the world. This is no mere political campaign; it is a generational awakening. The under-forty multitude—organised, impassioned, and unyielding—has out-manoeuvred those who were either sceptical or scandalised by their audacity. Whether the matter be the plight of Palestine, the inhuman cost of New York’s housing, or the weary cynicism of the old order, they have spoken with one voice: the age of complacency is over.

As an author, I cannot claim surprise that such a movement should arise amidst the turbulence of a second Trump presidency. I sensed, even then, that something new would be born of disillusionment. Yet I did not know its name until I began to see familiar faces—my own friends—labouring within the Mamdani campaign, their energy, intellect, and digital fluency shaping one of the most compelling media strategies of our time.

If the movement called No Kings was the cry of anti-Trump Baby Boomers seeking to reclaim a lost ideal, then Mamdani for Mayor has become the anthem of Generation Z—the same generation that filled the streets after the murder of George Floyd, and who, upon witnessing the devastation in Gaza, rose again in solidarity, even when their own universities turned upon them.

That they have now turned to electoral politics as their chosen form of resistance is both strategic and tragic. It is the fruit of repression. Over the past year, thousands of student activists—and even their mentors—have been suspended, expelled, deprived of livelihood, and in some cases, detained and threatened with deportation. The very campuses once heralded as citadels of free speech have become perilous terrain for those who dare to speak of justice in Palestine.

But movements animated by moral conviction do not vanish; they migrate. Driven off the quadrangles and lecture halls, these young idealists have found a new banner to march behind—the candidacy of a magnetic young Assembly Member who, through eloquence and authenticity, transformed protest into political power. First, they secured an astonishing primary victory, achieving record youth turnout. And tonight, they have carried that fervour into the general election, delivering a triumph as decisive as it is symbolic.

Let us call it what it is: a generational victory—perhaps even a generational vindication. The weary prophets of decline who claimed that the young cared for nothing but screens and slogans must now eat their words.

This moment, luminous and unsettling, joins a lineage of American awakenings. It is not the first of its kind, nor shall it be the last. For the great wheel of history turns not by the strength of the old, but by the vision of the young—those who, even when the night seems longest, still believe the dawn can be summoned.

PS: It is impossible for me to regard this as mere news, for it touches me on a far more intimate plane. His mother is not merely an acquaintance, but a senior to several of my dearest friends, with whom she remains in close companionship. To many whom I hold in the highest affection, she has been both guide and mentor — a figure of wisdom and poise whose influence has quietly shaped their paths. She has worked alongside writers and publishers who are among my closest confidants, her presence woven through the very fabric of my own circle. And so, yes — this moment, this triumph, is not a distant spectacle for me, but something deeply, almost tenderly, personal.