Dibyendu's WallScript

History is a restless theatre where kings rehearse their victories before vanishing into dust, and where merchants count their coins in the dim candlelight of markets long since extinguished. Empires rise like towers and collapse into rubble, leaving behind only inscriptions no one reads. Politicians, with their puffed speeches, imagine themselves architects of destiny, yet their words evaporate quicker than morning mist. Economists, with tables and charts, believe they hold the key to the future, yet their equations cannot account for the trembling of the human heart. The real prophets are not crowned, nor elected, nor enthroned. They wander with pens, brushes, questions, or silence. They are the philosophers, the writers, the artists, the visionaries—the prophets without altars—whose words and visions pierce the veils of time and reveal the direction of destiny.   Plato, who imagined a cave where men sat chained, watching shadows cast upon the wall, spoke more truly of empires th...

Part I – The Collapse of the Liberal Dream   The early 1990s shimmered with an intoxicating optimism. A wall had fallen in Berlin, the hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin, and a divided world seemed to sigh in relief. The Cold War was over, and in its ashes, many believed, lay the end of mankind’s great ideological struggles. Francis Fukuyama famously called it “the end of history.” Not the end of wars, or poverty, or human conflict, but the end of ideological contest: liberal democracy, coupled with market capitalism, would reign supreme. The arc of history, it seemed, had bent decisively toward freedom.   Washington, London, Paris, Berlin—capitals of the Western alliance—glowed with the self-assurance of victors. NATO’s mission appeared complete. The European Union prepared to absorb former communist nations, turning once-grey Warsaw and Prague into the new glittering symbols of democratic transition. America, the “indispensable nation,” was hailed not only as the...