2026

I am four chapters into 1984, a book by George Orwell, and something rather uncomfortable has happened.

I have started recognising myself. Not literally, of course.

I am not Winston Smith. I don't live in Oceania. I don't work at the Ministry of Truth. Nobody has handed me a pile of newspapers and asked me to rewrite history.

And yet, as I was reading, I kept thinking:

Why does this feel so familiar?

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949.

It was fiction. A dystopian future.

A world where the government watches you, information is controlled, history is rewritten, language is manipulated and people learn to monitor even their own thoughts because they know Big Brother might be watching.

And I am sitting here in 2026, reading it and thinking:

Am I living in 1984?

Because Winston's job particularly disturbed me.

He works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to alter the historical record whenever reality becomes inconvenient for the Party.

Something was reported yesterday.

Today, it is no longer true. So yesterday has to be changed.

The newspaper has to be corrected. The old version has to disappear.

And the piece of paper containing the old truth is thrown into a furnace. It becomes ash.

The truth doesn't merely get challenged. 

It gets erased.

And Winston knows that even having private thoughts can be dangerous.

He has a diary. A simple notebook.

And yet writing honestly in that notebook is an act of rebellion. That was the moment I stopped reading as casually as I had been. Because I realised that Orwell wasn't really writing about newspapers or notebooks.

He was writing about control.

Control over information. Control over memory. Control over what people are allowed to believe.

And most terrifyingly, control over what people are afraid to say.

That is what makes 1984 feel so alive in 2026.

The technology has changed.

We have smartphones instead of telescreens.

We have Instagram instead of newspapers.

We have algorithms instead of Party slogans.

We have cameras everywhere.

We can publish something to millions of people from our bedrooms.

And yet the fundamental question remains: 

Who controls the story?

Because if you control the story, you have enormous power over reality.

And then I started thinking about India.

About what happens when journalists, citizens, activists, politicians and ordinary people challenge the version of events being presented to them.

About the pressure that can accompany speaking publicly.

About the fear of being targeted, attacked, threatened, harassed or forced into silence.

About what happens when people start wondering whether saying something publicly is worth the consequences.

And that is where my mind went to Big Brother.

Or, more precisely, the idea of Big Brother.

Because Big Brother isn't frightening simply because he watches.

He is frightening because you know he might be watching.

And once you believe that, you start watching yourself.

You edit your own words. You reconsider your own thoughts. You delete the sentence. You don't post the video. You decide that perhaps it is safer to remain silent.

The surveillance doesn't even have to be constant.

You just have to believe that it could be.

And suddenly, you become your own censor.

That is what frightened me most about 1984.

And then, somehow, Orwell took me to Malala.

---

I read I Am Malala once before.

But I didn't understand it like I understand it now.

When I first read about Malala, I was a teenager too.

So when I read about a teenage girl in Pakistan who simply wanted to go to school, I felt for her.

I understood the teenage girl part. I understood what it meant to have dreams. I understood what it meant to be a young woman trying to claim her space in the world. I understood the injustice.

But I don't think I understood the depth of what she was doing.

Malala was writing about what was happening around her under Taliban rule.

She was documenting her reality.

She was saying, in effect:

This is happening to us.

Girls are being denied education. Fear is entering ordinary life. Something is being taken away from us. And somebody needs to tell the world.

She wrote.

And she was shot.

Not because she had an army. Not because she was a powerful politician. Not because she was threatening anyone physically. Because her voice was powerful enough to threaten an ideology that wanted her silent.

When I first read her story, I saw a brave girl.

Now I see something else.

Now I understand the woman who was writing.

Because now I understand what it feels like to look at your own country and think:

What happens when the version of reality being presented to everyone isn't the reality I am seeing?

That is the part I didn't fully understand as a teenager.

I understood Malala's courage.

I didn't understand her urgency.

Now I do.

And that realisation is strangely painful.

Because perhaps you don't truly understand the value of freedom until you begin to feel the possibility of losing some part of it.

You don't understand why someone would risk everything to write something down until you understand what it means to feel that your version of reality is being controlled.

And that is why 1984 and I Am Malala suddenly feel connected in my head.

Winston writes because the Party controls reality.

Malala writes because the Taliban controls reality around her.

Both understand, in completely different circumstances, that writing things down matters.

Because once you document something, you are saying:

This happened.

I saw this.

This is what my reality looked like.

And that is a dangerous sentence to anyone who needs complete control over the narrative.

---

I am not saying India is Oceania.

India is not Oceania.

And India is not Taliban-controlled Pakistan.

Those are different histories, different political systems and different circumstances.

But the underlying question is universal:

What happens when people become afraid to tell the truth?

And perhaps there is another question that frightens me even more:

What happens when you tell the truth — and someone simply erases it?

That is Winston's furnace.

The truth is not necessarily disproved.

It is destroyed.

The newspaper disappears. The record disappears. The evidence disappears. And eventually, if nobody remembers that it existed, the truth becomes almost impossible to recover.

That is what keeps coming back to me.

Because perhaps I can write this today.

Perhaps you can read it today.

But what happens tomorrow? What if this blog disappears? What if the video disappears? What if the article disappears? What if the record is changed? 

What if, years from now, someone looks back and says:

That never happened.

And there is nothing left to prove otherwise.

So perhaps I should do something rather ridiculous.

Perhaps I should write my own 1984.

Not 1984.

2026.

A spin-off, perhaps.

A dystopian story written from the other side of the page.

Big Brother gets a new name.

The Ministry of Truth gets a new address.

And Winston Smith becomes Twinkle Jain — sitting somewhere in Germany, reading Orwell, looking at the world around her and wondering whether she is watching fiction slowly become familiar.

Maybe this book would never become famous.

Maybe nobody would publish it.

Maybe one day it would disappear too.

But perhaps someone, forty years from now — or eighty — would find a copy.

And perhaps they would read it and say:

Wait.

This sounds familiar.

And then they might write their own.

That is the part that frightens me about history.

It repeats itself.

But perhaps it doesn't have to. Perhaps we can read the warnings left behind by Orwell. Perhaps we can remember Malala. Perhaps we can refuse to let the furnace become the final destination of inconvenient truths. Perhaps we can build a future in which people don't have to be brave simply to speak.

Where a girl can demand an education without becoming a target.

Where a journalist can investigate without fearing for their life.

Where a citizen can question their government without fearing disappearance.

Where truth doesn't belong to whoever has the greatest power to broadcast it.

I don't know what 2026 will look like when someone reads about it decades from now.

But I know what I want it to look like.

I want them to read this and think:

Thank God we didn't become that.

And perhaps that is the book I really want to write.

Not a prediction.

Not a prophecy.

A warning.

2026.

Written by Twinkle Jain.

Before someone else gets to write the ending.