Every word has a consequence. Every silence too.

Time of India

23-06-2025

As the Business Head for The Times of India, I lead strategic initiatives and drive growth for one of the nation's most influential media organisations. My journalist friends believe I've crossed over to the proverbial dark side. Living on the edges of a dynamic newsroom, I dabble infrequently into these times that we live and believe in the spectatorial axiom – 'distance provides perspective'. LESS ... MORE
Some mornings, I wake up and feel like I've wandered into a Beckett play with bad lighting. The coffee's still bitter, the headlines still absurd, and the world still insists on its commitment to performative collapse.
NASA, in its usual quietly panicked way, says droughts and floods have doubled. Not nudged, not nudging—doubled. It's the sort of data that should prompt emergency sessions, maybe a global reckoning or two. Instead, we get hashtags, panel discussions, and climate ministers giving interviews from fossil-fuel-sponsored lounges.
Britain, meanwhile, is crisping. 32 degrees in southeast England. '100 times more likely,' say the models, thanks to climate change. One imagines Queen Victoria rising from the grave just to slap the thermostat. And yet, we carry on—browsing weekend getaways, debating air conditioner brands—while pretending this is normal.
But what's truly deafening is the silence. The bureaucratic stillness. The studied inaction. Albert Camus wrote of the absurd as 'a confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.' But I'd argue the world is no longer silent. It's shrieking. The unreasonable silence now lies squarely on our end.
Then there's Trump, of course. Authorising 'Operation Midnight Hammer'—because nothing says sober diplomacy like a Tom Clancy fever dream. Seven stealth bombers, a strike on Iran's nuclear facility, and suddenly foreign policy reads like rejected Top Gun fan fiction. Maverick, but with midterms.
Markets react like they always do: panicked, posturing, and pretending to understand. Oil flirted with $80. The European Central Bank cut rates. The Fed stood still, as if still figuring out whether it's managing inflation or mood swings. Somewhere in all this, Jean-Paul Sartre might have whispered, 'Man is condemned to be free.' Yes. And central banks are condemned to be late.
The G7 met in Alberta and produced a flurry of statements on 'shared prosperity' and 'climate resilience'—terms now so hollow they echo when spoken. It's like watching a piano recital on the Titanic. We are awash in vocabulary, but bone-dry on courage.
That's when the words hit me—more urgent, more distilled than anything I could write:
'Every word has a consequence. Every silence too.'
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It's not just philosophical embroidery. It's the diagnosis. We are not dying from what is said, but from what is left unsaid. From the global pauses. The quiet vetoes. The waiting-for-someone-else-to-move.
And still, we scroll, we post, we like. We remain astonishingly fluent in denial. The world is not ending with a bang, but a buffer wheel.
So yes—every word has a consequence. And every silence too. And every time we pretend otherwise, we're not avoiding the fire. We're fanning it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find sunscreen with a warning label that says: 'May not protect against existential dread.'
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Views expressed above are the author's own.