The Age of Rage

by Shruti Kohli

Despite unprecedented access to knowledge, our public spaces, from streets to parliaments to boardrooms to borders, are now theatres of unchecked rage.

It was noon, of early winter. The kind that casts a pale, unobtrusive light over the city’s frayed routines. I was idling on a narrow road just before the junction, wedged into the slow, resigned crawl of midday congestion. The car was still. The silence inside was more accepting than impatient. There was, quite evidently, nowhere else to go.

Directly ahead, a man on a scooter occupied the sliver of space in front of me. He was jittery, unsettled, not in motion, but in presence. His head bobbed oddly along with the weight of his helmet, as if it sat too heavily on his shoulders.

For a moment, I wondered whether it was discomfort or distraction or a disorder. Then I stopped wondering altogether. He nudged his scooter forward, angling toward the next lane. It worked in my favour. Any inch gained in traffic feels like an inheritance.

But just as he moved, I caught the flicker of an impact. His front wheel seemed to jolt against the mudguard of a car in the adjacent lane. The driver inside, a man seated at a diagonal to my view, remained perfectly still. No flinch, no gesture. Perhaps I had imagined it. Perhaps it was just the stutter of the road.

And then, everything accelerated quickly.

The driver tore out his earbuds with sudden urgency and flung open his door. The line of vehicles inched forward slightly, but in the rearview mirror, the scene behind me ruptured into violence. He was no longer a driver. He had morphed into something ugly. He was throwing punches, fast and unrelenting. One to the face. Then another. A third followed before I had even registered the shift.

It was over in seconds, for me, as the congestion started clearing quickly and I had to drive away faster. But the weight of it—how easily the veneer of civility cracked—lingered longer.

What happened behind me was not an aberration. It was, in its own disturbing way, a perfect metaphor for the world we now inhabit. Rage has raised its other ugly face. It no longer just simmers beneath the surface and schemes. It also audaciously detonates in traffic jams, political echelons, boardrooms, borders.

The man who punched another over a mudguard is not so different from the leaders who trade threats like playground taunts or stab each other in the back. We are, it seems, permanently on the brink—of insult, of injury, of war.

This is not a world untouched by progress. We are more educated than ever. We have at our fingertips the collective literature of humanity, entire civilisations captured in pixels. The Enlightenment promised reason. The Internet promised connection. Globalisation promised interdependence. And yet, everywhere we turn, people are angry.

What went wrong?

Some might argue that technology didn’t create rage. That it simply illuminated it. That social media is a mirror held up to the human psyche, and the reflection was always this grotesque. But that is too convenient an explanation, and too complacent. For it assumes that exposure cannot be tempered by wisdom. That civilisation, despite all its advancements, is helpless against the primal.

We must ask the harder question: Why has knowledge failed to humanise us?

Rage today is not an impulsive flicker. It is curated, monetised, algorithmically fed. We wear it like armour. We brand it as identity. The more nuanced the world becomes, the more simplistically we wish to frame it: us versus them, right versus wrong, purity versus betrayal. Anger, once a moral warning light, has become a substitute for thought.

Leaders and managers no longer defuse conflict. They scheme it, stage it. The performance of fury has become a show of strength.

In private life, too, patience is in retreat. The slow, steady rhythms of conversation, disagreement, and repair are being replaced by instant verdicts. Ghosting, blocking, cancelling—we are leaning towards tools of severance, not resolution. We mistake catharsis for justice, outrage for integrity.

This is not to romanticise the past. Human cruelty is ancient. But what feels new is the normalisation of rage as a default setting, rather than an aberration. The world seems to have misread its own maturity. We mistook schooling for empathy, connectivity for communion, data for discernment.

What we are witnessing is not the failure of education per se, but the erosion of its purpose. We taught ourselves how to win arguments, not how to listen. We built platforms for expression, not reflection. And in doing so, we built a culture where everyone speaks but no one hears—where rage drowns out reason.

If this is civilisation, then it is one built on fault lines. We read the great books, taught empathy in classrooms, and still turned on one another. The tragedy of our time is not ignorance. It's the fury of the well-informed, wielded without humility, without pause, without grace..