A New Year, A Tougher Mirror: Change Must Begin With Us!!!

As another year draws to a close, most of us look forward with optimism, new plans, new resolutions, and fresh expectations from the system, the government, and the country. But somewhere, deep inside, we know that as a nation we still have a long journey ahead of us. And the first obstacle isn’t policy, infrastructure, or leadership, it is our own civic mindset.

Every day we see people driving on the wrong side of the road, throwing trash wherever they feel like, spitting in public spaces, or even damaging basic amenities like footpath tiles — and yet we are quick to point fingers at the government when things go wrong. But who are these officials, administrators, and politicians we love to blame? They come from the same society as us, shaped by the same habits, same culture, and the same casual approach toward discipline.

Even every year when thousands of young people clear competitive exams and enter government service with the intent to “serve the nation,” we rarely see the kind of transformational change we hope for. The reason is simple; they don’t enter the system with a different mindset; they carry forward the same societal behaviors we all grew up with.

As someone working in operational excellence, I have seen this at workplaces too, processes improve only when people believe in discipline, ownership, and long-term thinking. Without that, no system sustains improvement.

Another challenge we carry as a country is our obsession with short-term gains. From childhood, we are trained to either crack exams or become employable. Our education system and social expectations rarely encourage curiosity, experimentation, or research-driven innovation. Over time, this becomes a structural bottleneck. A nation with the world’s largest population still remains dependent on others for critical technologies.

We celebrate talent, but we do not nurture inventors.

We reward compliance, but we rarely encourage questioning.

A society that does not promote innovation eventually becomes a consumer, not a creator.

If change has to come, it must begin at the societal level, in how we think, behave, and participate as citizens. The land that once produced deep knowledge, sciences, philosophies, and the Vedas should not remain satisfied with mediocrity or dependency. Our heritage is not just something to talk about, it should inspire us to build, research, and innovate again.

With the new year approaching, this is perhaps the best time to reflect. We, the people of India, must rediscover discipline in everyday life, whether on roads, in public spaces, or at workplaces. We must encourage innovation, respect research, and think beyond short-term wins. And yes; as a nation, we must also be strong, brave, and prepared to defend ourselves proactively when needed, rather than hiding behind comfortable narratives.

Real change will not be delivered by any government alone. It has to be lived, practiced, and demonstrated by citizens, one action at a time.

If we truly wish to bring back our glory, it will not happen through slogans or speeches, it will come through discipline, innovation, courage, and a mindset that puts long-term national progress ahead of short-term convenience.

And that journey begins with each one of us.

Where Is Mobility’s Smartphone Moment?

In communication, the leap has been nothing short of revolutionary. We moved from wired landline phones to pocket-sized supercomputers powered by AI devices that can see, hear, learn, translate languages, navigate the planet, and connect billions of people in real time. The underlying technologies semiconductors, networks, software, and data evolved exponentially, each generation making the previous one almost obsolete.

Mobility, on the other hand, never had such a moment.

Cars today may look sleeker, safer, and more connected, but at their core they still rely on internal combustion engines invented more than a century ago. Aircraft, despite massive advances in materials and avionics, still fly using turbine engines based on principles established in the mid-20th century. Roads are wider, vehicles are faster, but the fundamental idea of how we move has barely changed.

There was no “landline-to-smartphone” transition in transportation only gradual refinement.

Even electric vehicles, often presented as a revolution, are evolutionary rather than disruptive. They replace the engine, not the system. Traffic remains traffic. Congestion remains congestion. Travel time remains stubbornly similar. A smarter engine does not solve a system-level problem.

How Big Is the Gap? Some Statistics to Ground the Issue

Digital Tech Growth

The microprocessor and semiconductor innovations that power mobile phones follow Moore’s Law-style exponential growth, meaning computing power roughly doubles every couple of years enabling vastly better performance, connectivity, and capabilities in each phone generation. 

Car Engine Innovation

Traditional internal combustion engines power the vast majority of automobiles even today, and while there have been improvements in efficiency and emissions, the fundamental engine design remains rooted in century-old principles and hasn’t seen a similarly explosive reinvention.

Electric vehicle powertrains, hybrid systems, and alternative fuels are emerging, but they are still less than half the global fleet and infrastructure is lagging. 

Why Digital Leaped While Mobility Crawled

The reason is structural. Digital technology lives in a near-frictionless world bits move without mass, without gravity, without physical infrastructure expansion. Mobility operates in the physical realm, constrained by energy density, safety, regulation, infrastructure, and human behavior. Every breakthrough must coexist with roads, airports, cities, and millions of legacy assets already in use.

As a result, innovation in mobility gets absorbed as incremental efficiency, not radical transformation.

We optimized engines. We optimized aerodynamics. We optimized fuel injection. We optimized navigation. But we never redefined movement itself.

The Real Cost of No Breakthrough

The absence of a true mobility breakthrough has consequences we quietly accept as normal:

Cities spend decades widening roads that fill up within years.

Airports expand terminals, yet feel perpetually overcrowded.

Railways run at capacity, while demand keeps growing.

Professionals spend hours everyday commuting, time permanently lost, not just delayed.

For those whose jobs demand constant travel, the irony is stark: more mobility in theory, less freedom in practice. Time spent moving increasingly outweighs time spent being somewhere.

Traffic and Time Wasted Globally

According to the TomTom Traffic Index 2024, typical yearly traffic delay per commuter in many global cities is staggering: 

City Avg Time Lost in Traffic (per year)

Barranquilla, Colombia ~130 hours

Bengaluru, India ~117 hours

Kolkata, India ~110 hours

Pune, India ~108 hours

London, UK ~113 hours

Lima, Peru ~155 hours

Davao City, Philippines ~136 hours

Trujillo, Peru ~102 hours

Dublin, Ireland ~155 hours

Kyoto, Japan ~95 hours

(Typical travel is for a 10 km distance with congestion taken into account.) 

This means in many major cities commuters spend nearly 100+ hours per year simply stuck in traffic. 

Meanwhile, some larger metro-region studies like the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard find that drivers in cities like New York could lose around 100+ hours per year to congestion, costing billions in lost productivity. 

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What a True Breakthrough Would Look Like

A real mobility breakthrough wouldn’t just mean a cleaner engine or a faster vehicle. It would mean:

Movement that decouples from congestion

Travel time that collapses non-linearly, not incrementally

Systems that scale without demanding proportional infrastructure

Mobility that feels as radically different from today as a smartphone felt compared to a landline

We haven’t reached that point yet.

Humanity mastered information faster than motion. We learned how to move ideas at the speed of light, but we still move bodies at the speed of roads. Until mobility experiences its own paradigm shift, not just technological polish traffic jams, crowded terminals, and wasted hours will remain the silent tax we pay for progress