WITERATI | The year that was & time for pause

2025 saw classic tales reimagined, with modern twists and excess prompting a movement towards slowness, amid drama and societal changes.

A year of drama, melodrama and mammon drama.

French police officers stand next to a furniture elevator used by robbers to enter the Louvre Museum in Paris on October 19 (AFP)

A year that saw new-age narratives tweaking and twisting many a classic tale or folk fable.

The Louvre heist imbued new-age twists to the famous fable, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’. Forty thieves are passé; all it takes is four.

Ali Baba’s proverbial ‘Open Sesame’ to bundle off with billions’ worth of booty has a new verve, vocabulary and vintage vibe. Vehicle-mounted extendable lift and swank angle grinders to gatecrash glass galleries are the new ‘Khul ja sim sim’.

The Shakespearean drama, ‘Merchant of Venice’, too, tossed up twists that were new age. Giving moneylender Shylock a run for his money was none other than POTUS Donald Trump.

Sporting shades of Shylock-esque monetary extractions, Trump’s trade war with lesser nations tossed a twist in the tale, too. It is about extracting not the proverbial ‘pound of flesh’, but many a mound of ‘dollars’.

Cinderella to Shylock

The over-interpreted and over-told fairytale ‘Cinderella’ got reinvented in the Sunjay Kapur fortune feud.

With Kapur’s children making claims in court about the ‘stepmother’, the Cinderella-esque stepmother has been reinvented with a modern face.

Far removed from the proverbial podgy, matronly storybook stepmother, the new-age stepmom sports solitaires, bumblebee pout, and a bikini-ready, botoxed bod.

The new-age stepmom doesn’t subject her stepdaughter to menial household chores or scrubbing of floors to manifest ill will. The digital-age stepmom allegedly re-scripts not just the Cinderella-esque stepmother but also the will.

The curious case of ‘The Devil Wears Vero Moda’.

Slow and steady

The classic tale of ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, too, asserted its age-old wisdom.

This is also that time of year when Tweeple are bombarded with lists left, right, and centre. Lists that look longer than Tharoorian vocabulary and fatter than Bollywood egos. Bucket lists to best-book lists, Christmas travel lists to New Year’s eve eating-out lists, and what not.

Each list prodding Tweeple to action and more action.

Nothing succeeds like excess.

All this excess of year-end wine and dine does make one pine. Pine for a lifestyle shift that has been catching on slow and steady.

The slowness movement.

Seeing how some young lives in the fast lane were snuffed out this 2025 season, it may be a clarion call for slowing down. With some ‘poster boys’ and ‘poster girls’ of speed living – social media influencers Arunay Sood, Misha Agarwal, Pranshu Yadav & Co to model Shefali Jariwala – bowing out early due to burnout, bullying or speed stress, it may be time to turn to the philosophy that has journo Carl Honore as its prime proponent.

Slowness may be the most significant takeaway from Season 2025.

The curious case of ‘Slow and steady spurns the race’.

chetnakeer@yahoo.com