The world, since the 1990s, has carried within its body the terror of sudden waters and invisible breath, the tsunami and the COVID years, disasters that have carved deep rivers into the memory of humanity.
An updation on the world’s cultural benefits, the profits of the human mind, and the endurance of strong men has always been written in both silence and thunder. The world, since the 1990s, has carried within its body the terror of sudden waters and invisible breath, the tsunami and the COVID years, disasters that have carved deep rivers into the memory of humanity. The Indian Ocean waves of 2004 struck like a hand from nature itself, swallowing villages in a single gasp, leaving behind more horror in the mind than even the lingering disease that spread later. People recall the silence after the waters receded as heavier than the noise of their arrival, and that silence has remained lodged in the collective psyche. COVID, slower but more suffocating, tightened the bonds of distance, turned screens into companions, and left the human body distrustful of the air itself. Yet when people compare, many still confess that the suddenness of the tsunami – its raw, unfathomable wave – haunts more fiercely than the patient spread of disease.
This entry of catastrophe into the human calendar was not the only transformation of the 1990s and after. For the same decade that brought horror also brought triumph, the global opening of economies, the circulation of goods, voices, and ideas, a globalization that declared itself as the inevitable truth. The fall of the Soviet Union became the symbolic curtain-raiser for this new era, capitalism rushing in like wind into a room that had been shut. Yet this wind was not clean or innocent. It carried with it both prosperity and poison. For communists in places like Kerala in southern India, where the red flag had once flown proudly over fields and universities, this globalization brought a quiet retreat. The ideology did not vanish, but it folded into the private corners of the mind, into whispered debates in tea shops, into the nostalgia of those who remembered marches and manifestos. The suffering of communists was not just political defeat, but the cultural strain of watching a new order build itself on technologies and luxuries that did not need their red vocabulary. What had once been the public pulse of revolution became an inner ache, an adaptation, a survival in silence.
Meanwhile across the oceans, America basked in its own triumph, the lavish dream that radiated through Hollywood, music charts, and Silicon Valley devices. To the rest of the world, the American life was a golden invitation: skyscrapers glittering in New York, freeways stretching endlessly, celebrities shining from screens. Yet beneath the shine, something redder, rust-like, appeared. The same wealth brought overconsumption, obesity, debt, and diseases that struck at the mind and body. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s left scars deeper than statistics, painting American modernity not only as promise but as fragility. Later, the opioid epidemic revealed a different face of suffering, a quieter terror that hollowed towns and families. The metaphor of “red oxides” fits here, for America’s brilliance seemed at times like iron turning to rust, the dream corroding from within. Cultural dominance remained, yes, but it was no longer unchallenged in the mind. Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to whisper other possibilities. It was not America alone who ruled the reality of imagination anymore.
In this shifting stage, the role of women also turned. Where once they were measured only as caretakers, now they became pillars in economies, politics, and cultural narratives. The strength, or bala, of women in holding not only children but entire societies grew visible. From Kerala’s literacy campaigns led by women teachers, to African markets run by women traders, to corporate boardrooms where glass ceilings cracked, a quiet transformation took place. Yet, as with every transformation, there was exploitation too. The world of media and science often commodified women’s bodies and struggles, turning sacred strength into slogans, saints into spectacles, and truths into the so-called “three F’s” of fake literature. Even in this misuse, however, the undeniable fact remained: women carried more power, agency, and recognition than ever before in modern history. They were no longer silent companions of culture but its central architects.
But culture is never free of conflict. After the guns of World War II fell silent, the world did not rest. It entered what may be called a silent war – not always declared, not always visible, but deadly nonetheless. Those who resisted caste oppression in India, racial domination in America, or dictatorship in Latin America often found themselves eliminated quietly. The Cold War, though it appeared to many as a stalemate of superpowers, was fought in the blood of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and smaller corners where the invisible hand of intelligence agencies struck. The world did not see trenches or tanks in every nation, but it saw bodies, activists, thinkers, workers, silenced by strips of violence. These were wars fought not always with uniforms, but with whispers, betrayals, and bullets that left little record. Culture carries those silences as heavily as it carries songs.
In the same decades, Hollywood – once the unchallenged dream factory – began to wobble. The global audience that once waited only for American films now found delight in Korean cinema, Indian epics, Nigerian comedies. The Billboard charts that once defined global music tastes began to lose weight as independent artists, YouTube sensations, and local languages claimed space. The superhero comics that once created universal heroes fractured into fan wars and oversaturation. Hollywood was not dead, but its monopoly had cracked, its glamour questioned, its creativity diluted by endless repetitions. The cultural throne was no longer singular.
While America faltered, older civilizations continued to speak in subtler tongues. Egypt, land of pyramids and hieroglyphs, carried forward a lesson not in armies or Sanskrit texts but in survival through symbol. Unlike India, where bhakti and Sanskrit tied religion to culture, Egypt’s gift to the modern mind was less devotional, more architectural, more mysterious. The pyramids rose not as temples for present worship but as eternal letters carved into stone, surviving colonization, Islamic rule, modernization, and even neglect. Egypt’s culture whispered to the world: even without conquest, without armies, one can endure by simply leaving marks that no time can erase. In the endurance of letters, Egypt remained present, invaluable, resisting oblivion.
Meanwhile the great imperial agendas – America’s civil war lessons, Britain’s colonial expeditions, America’s bloody entanglement in Vietnam – revealed themselves as failures of permanence. They conquered but did not heal, occupied but did not convince. Instead of universal order, they created resistance cultures: the Civil Rights Movement in America, decolonial literature in Africa, postcolonial thought in Asia. The empires wanted submission, but what they produced was reflection, rebellion, and new languages of identity. This too is cultural profit: oppression breeds art, and resistance is itself a form of memory.
And then, the terror of terrorism: in the name of ideology, in the name of religion, violence erupted across decades. The Arab world became the symbolic center of fear after September 11, 2001, though terrorism itself has no single nationality. The destruction of towers in New York scarred global consciousness, yet the roots of that violence stretched back into wars, occupations, betrayals. But here too culture offered a counter-lesson. In Pathanamthitta, Kerala, the legend of Vavar – a Muslim companion of the Hindu deity Ayyappa – stood as a living example of harmony. Pilgrims visiting Sabarimala still bow to both Ayyappa and Vavar, showing that coexistence is not a dream but a practice. To invoke Vavar against terrorism is to remind the world that traditions of harmony already exist, waiting to be remembered. Where armies fail, stories succeed.
All of this – the tsunami, COVID, globalization, Kerala’s communists, America’s rusting dream, the rise of women, silent wars, Hollywood’s cracks, Egypt’s eternal letters, imperial failures, terrorism, and Vavar’s lesson – they are not separate chapters but one continuous scroll. They flow into each other like rivers into sea, each carrying silt, memory, and possibility. Together they show that culture is not decoration, but survival. It records both triumphs and horrors, both resilience and erosion. It tells us that humanity is updated not only by machines or economies but by wounds, songs, silences, and strong men and women who endure.
Thus the world today is not simply America’s, not simply the empire’s, not simply modern or ancient. It is a mosaic of disasters endured and lessons remembered. The profits of the human mind are not counted only in dollars or discoveries but in the ability to take terror, rust, silence, and betrayal, and still weave them into meaning. This is culture: a teacher without classroom, a shield without sword, a memory without end. It whispers that even in terror, humanity finds poetry; even in decay, endurance; and even in silence, the strength to begin again.
