The end of the year is a bittersweet caesura, a moment of pause in time’s constant change. We dwell for a spell in both past and future, subtly aware that endings are more tangled up with beginnings than we care to admit.

The world entered this year with a genocidal war in Palestine and that is how we leave it, inhumanity still clouding the air. In India the year ended with the deaths of many icons—Zakir Hussain, Shyam Benegal, MT Vasudevan Nair and now Manmohan Singh. They shaped something of the world we grew up in. And though that world is already changed, their passing reminds us of the loss we have been experiencing all along with a piercing clarity. Perhaps this is most true of Dr. Singh.