WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES & IDEAS.

Udweg Aru Anudweg, Volume II

The second volume of Udweg Aru Anudweg continues the conversation begun in the earlier essays, but from a world that had changed considerably—and from a writer whose questions had also evolved.

The essays collected here span the years from 2018 into 2025. They were written through a period of unusual disruption: political change, accelerating digital communication, debates over identity and citizenship, the COVID-19 pandemic, transformations in education, economic uncertainty, international conflict, and eventually the arrival of artificial intelligence as a subject of everyday public concern.

The range is deliberately broad. Essays move from Assamese language and culture to citizenship, democracy, healthcare, education, economics, British politics, international conflict, terrorism, public narratives and the emerging crisis surrounding intelligence in the digital age. What binds them together is not subject matter but method: beginning with an event, claim or observable problem and asking what lies beneath it.

If the earlier volume grew substantially out of a physician’s concern with patient safety, professional responsibility and institutional quality, this volume increasingly asks a wider question: how does a society know what it thinks it knows?

Evidence consequently becomes more than scientific data. It includes the language through which events are described, the measurements used to justify policy, the narratives through which communities understand themselves, and the information environments within which citizens form judgements. The concern with healthcare therefore expands naturally into concern with governance, media, education and public reasoning.

The years of the pandemic sharpened this enquiry. Questions familiar to medicine—uncertainty, measurement, risk, interpretation and proportionality—became questions for entire societies. In the years that followed, similar problems appeared in new forms as public discourse became increasingly mediated by digital platforms and competing narratives.

Yet Udweg Aru Anudweg is not intended as a chronicle of complaint. The title remains its organising principle. Udweg is the unease that alerts us to a problem; Anudweg is the composure necessary to examine it. Criticism without reflection easily becomes outrage, while composure without concern becomes indifference. The essays occupy the space between the two.

Read alongside Volume I, this collection therefore records an intellectual progression: from professional introspection towards civic philosophy; from the quality of institutions to the quality of public reasoning; and from asking what has gone wrong to asking how knowledge, judgement and responsibility themselves are formed.

The subjects belong largely to Assam and India, but the questions increasingly do not. They belong to a world struggling to reconcile unprecedented access to information with an equally unprecedented difficulty in deciding what deserves to be believed.