Shreya Sen-Handley | Six Reasons Why 2025 Wasn’t A Total Disaster

At this time of dying light, and not just the last gasp from the heavens but smothering our political-economic landscape, I didn’t want to pile on the gloom by listing all that’s gone awry this annum. Himalayan in scale, to dredge them up would be to relive horrors we’ve barely survived. Morale-wrecking and hope-shattering, that ain’t the baggage we want to lug into 2026!

Instead, I wanted to remind you of the joy we’ve experienced, no matter how paltry and unimportant. Yet, when I set out to enumerate them, I hadn’t counted on it becoming this uphill a climb. Because so little of this dwindling annum can be dubbed delightful, the Oxford English Dictionary has appropriately declared ‘rage bait’ the Word of the Year.

Not only is rage the default setting for our planet’s multiplying lumpen, they are easily and constantly whipped into this heedlessly savage state by the corporations, media, and political parties, perpetually profiting from them. And we have much to protest but not against the powerless targets we’re manipulated into directing our hate.

Consider turning it instead on a revered dictionary insisting two words are just one, and murdering language!

But 2026, by its very name, deserves at least six bequests of hope from 2025, to give it something to build on. The six I will highlight are events that raised a smile in our home, to get you started on lists of your own, because each of us will need uplifting memories to hold on to, on our rocky road to global redemption.

1) The two Indian national women’s cricket teams that won World Cup tournaments, overcoming huge socio-economic obstacles, overwhelming press and public pressure, misogyny and international condescension, and in the case of the blind women’s team, immense physical disadvantages too, turned a bleak year for not just sport but everything, into one with flashes, occasionally dazzling, of optimism. Particularly heartwarming was the self-belief they displayed when all about them were shouting naaay and the obvious bonds between team mates. Jemi’s sacrifice of money-making matches to stay by her friend Smriti’s side in the latter’s hour of need being just one example.

2) Zohran Mamdani’s big, beautiful New York mayoral win was a blazing repudiation of the political and corporate villainy that’s poisoning the planet. That a politician in this day and age can mean well was already a pleasant surprise, that he actually won, despite, or maybe even because of, his good intentions, was a bracing, much-needed shake-up of the systemic corruption in our lives. Fingers crossed that neither his altruism nor his broad political support deserts him as he attempts to restore equity to NYC, but what reassures me most about The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Mister-Cardamom are his multicultural credentials; born of erudite, accomplished, Hindu-Muslim Indian parents on the African continent, and married to a free-spirited Middle-Eastern woman, his open-minded global embrace is what we need in spades.

3) Heartening in recent years have been the efforts of some governments in making the web safer for children, e.g. UK’s Online Safety Act, which restricts sites from allowing kids access to harmful material like incitement to suicide, or porn. But they don’t go far enough, by all accounts, with tech firms finding loopholes to exploit in their inexorable hunt for more power, more profit, and more impressionable victims. Which is why Australia banning under-16s from social media was welcomed by parents the world over, because if successful Down Under it can be replicated anywhere, at least partially shielding the too-young from the evils lurking online.

4) Footballer Gary Lineker winning the UK’s National TV Award, voted for by the public, for his decades of excellent sportscasting, would appear to have no international ramifications, unless you know how often he speaks up for the brutalised, from under-attack immigrants and refugees in Britain to Palestinians pulverised by Israel. This year he lost his high-profile job at the BBC as a result of his steadfast outspokenness but the right-thinking amongst the British banded together to hand him this television prize instead (with a healthy Netflix deal following in its footsteps). No mere television award then this, but an instance of good Karma in play.

5) Television, in fact, was one of the few bright spots of 2025, with clever, witty shows like Slow Horses providing us with distraction from, and insight into, a world that appears to have willingly undergone an empathy bypass. Entertainment may never directly solve our problems, but when we connect with a motley bunch of flawed but likeable characters in fiction, we train ourselves to do it IRL too.

6) Don’t forget triumphs on the homefront when you compile your own catalogues, though I must admit this year presented us with fewer such moments to revel in. Every night my mother messages me from Kolkata, “any news?” she asks. “None,” I say, before reminding us both that no news is good news these days. Our son has got offers from venerable British universities. Our daughter, the younger ‘un, is on track to do as well. Our canine child had a terrible accident but is recovering well. My parents keep contracting mystery ailments, but bounce back too, thankfully. I completed writing my Penguin-commissioned book. And Hubby and I are still happy together in the 21st year of our partnership. No peaks, but a steady cantering along life’s path for which I’m grateful.