This was the year when the threat of 'Triple-T' looming over Muslim women was put to sword. This appears to be the one big-bang social reform that can pave the way for a new India in the long run. Two years after the Supreme Court said the practice violated the fundamental rights of Muslim women, this July, Parliament voted to make instant triple talaq a punishable offence. Although it was perceived as a progressive piece of legislation for long, it took both Houses of Parliament enormous doses of vacillation before it could become law. To put things in perspective, even Bangladesh and our notso-friendly neighbour Pakistan were among the 20 countries that had banned the practice of declaring divorce by saying talaq three times either in person or by phone, SMS or social media post, before we did.

This was also the year that marked the celebrations of 150 years of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi and 100 years after General Dyer ordered the troops of East India Company to open fire on peaceful protesters in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

What didn't change from 2018 was that the nation's highest court had to step in to intervene in some significant societal matters. If last year, it ruled in favour of striking down Section 377, in 2019, it had to intervene in the case of Kuldip Singh Sengar, an expelled MLA accused of trying to kill a woman who alleged he had raped her and then conspired to move the rape trial out of Uttar Pradesh. Sengar had been behind bars for charges of rape and kidnapping, now the police suspected him of orchestrating a car crash that left the woman critical and killed two aunts travelling with her when a truck hit them. Also, by maintaining status quo on its position of allowing entry of menstruating women into Sabarimala - although it has been referred it to a larger bench - the apex court displayed its heart is in the right place.

2019 was also the year when the Pink City found recognition as a World Heritage Site. Suddenly the entire world and their aunt appeared to discover the Rajasthani capital and fawned over its architecture, replete with palaces, boulevards and havelis. Even as pundits held forth on the windfall this new status would bring to the state, there was adverse news from other parts of the country. In June, Chennai faced a Day-Zero crisis when no water was left, bringing back memories of Cape Town almost a year ago. Chennai wasn't the only one facing this shortfall. Bengaluru, too, is headed that way and tourists have been dissuaded from visiting Shimla, because the once glorious summer capital of British India is parched. If one took a step back, one could see lessons in the crisis for other cities. Integrated urban water management and rain water harvesting need to be adopted urgently, before other leading Indian metropolises meet a similar fate. But our cities and urban planners never seem to learn from history. Had they done it, the inferno that engulfed Hotel Arpit Palace in Delhi's Karol Bagh could have been averted.

In a society where everybody is quick to take offence, capturing eyeballs is easier than learning from hindsight. Still, even in these increasingly volatile times, the same set of sensation-seekers who followed the fortunes of Jolly Shaju, a serial killer in Kerala with interest, dropped their cynicism to pray for the survival of Sujith Wilson, a twoyear-old who fell into a borewell in Tiruchirappalli, only to be dejected in the end.

But the most heart-warming story about new India's post-377 attitudes and social mores, ironically, broke on American television when Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju revealed they were a couple to Fareed Zakaria. The two, who featured on the TIME's list of 100 most influential people, had fought the case to overturn a 157-year-old colonial era law that made consensual gay sex illegal. Their struggle may have helped achieve a historic verdict for India's LGBTQ+ community, but for years our judiciary had been oblivious, some would say blind, to their sensitivities till they decided to come out.