…. we do not really know the people who live beside us?
August 2026
When I was a child, every neighbourhood had an unofficial security system. It was called knowing one another. Your mother knew who lived next door. The grocer knew whose son had returned from college. The postman knew which house had a new baby. The stranger was noticed because everyone else was familiar.
Today we have CCTV cameras, biometric gates, visitor apps, facial recognition and digital identities. Yet we often do not know the person who shares the lift with us.
The newspapers tell us that a young man, described by neighbours as polite and ordinary, is now accused of living a different life of a terrorist behind an ordinary face. If the allegations are proven true, it is a chilling reminder that the greatest disguises are no longer masks. They are routines. Terrorism succeeds long before any explosion. It succeeds the day suspicion replaces trust, when every unfamiliar face begins to look dangerous, and every ordinary neighbour becomes a question mark.
That is precisely why a civilised society must refuse both complacency and paranoia. Security agencies must remain vigilant. Citizens must remain alert. But neither should surrender the humanity that allows communities to exist.
As I folded the newspaper, I wondered whether the greatest security failure of our times is not merely that dangerous people can hide among ordinary citizens. It is that modern life has quietly taught ordinary citizens to live among one another without ever truly knowing those around us. Perhaps the strongest wall against terror is not built of concrete or surveillance. Perhaps it begins when a society rediscovers the forgotten art of being a community.
— Rudra Bose, The Last Writer of Kolkata
#thelastwriterofkolkata, #rudrabose, #shaktighosal, #communitylife
A New Beginning 
This cuts deeper than security. We’ve traded knowing our neighbors for the illusion of safety through surveillance and lost the actual safety that comes from genuine community. A person can live in a building for years and never know the people on their floor. We’ve built walls everywhere except where they matter. The solution Bose points to is radical: simply know each other again. Let neighbors be neighbors. That’s the security system we dismantled without realizing we’d need it.
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Well said. Life at times shoes us pathways that are so much common sense that we ask ourselves, ‘ What stopped us from seeing that ourselves?
Shakti Ghosal
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