India, May 22 -- Is the year slipping away, or is it we who quietly slip through the year, unnoticed even by ourselves?

There is something pleasantly strange about the time when we move from one year to another. Fireworks fade, greetings come to rest, calendars are replaced, and the world begins to move forward impatiently. Yet somewhere within this movement, a distinct feeling anchors within us, which is a sort of a personal ritual of turning inward.

It arrives while opening an old notebook and finding a sentence highlighted with unusual conviction or during a late-night scroll through photographs in our phones, when the early months begin to look distant, as if they belonged to another version of ourselves. Sometimes it comes simply a...