When Boundaries Are Crossed Or Challenged: Outlook's Latest Issue On Gen-Z Protests in Nepal

Why Nepal's Gen-Z took to the streets, seeking accountability from their former liberators.

Punjab reels under floods as history, politics and rivers collide all over again.

Essays, reports and columns on India, Nepal, water and climate that trace a nation and region's tectonic shifts.

Outlook's October 1, 2025 issue opens with the cover package, 'Nepal: Gen Z Sets Boundaries', where the restive energy of a new generation takes over the streets of Kathmandu and reshapes the conversation about democracy.

In 'OK, Boomer, Time's Up', writer and academic Dinesh Kafle recalls his own days of protest against the monarchy and sees a strange, bitter continuity in his students' chants, now directed at the very leaders who once promised a New Nepal with a brighter future.

His account of September 8, 2025 is not just a chronicle of protest but a portrait of a nation, painted over two decades, whose people have outgrown what the republic has been offering to them.

As a counterpoint of sorts, Emmy-winning documentarian and writer Ruchira Gupta turns the clock back in 'Throwback to the 80s', drawing on her years as a journalist in India, covering democracy in Nepal when it was just 'a whispered hope and a dangerous word'.

With clandestine meetings and banned dispatches, she shows how voices carried across borders to rattle an entrenched monarchy and how constitutionalism finally found a foothold.

Next, Outlook’s consulting editor Seema Guha adds a regional frame in her essay on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his diplomatic relations with the Himalayan kingdom, reflecting on how an arc that began in hope now hovers at a turning point where new choices must be made.

The issue then travels to Punjab, where the rivers Chenab, Ravi and Jhelum carry both memory and menace. In “Rain and Ruin,” historian Harjeshwar Pal Singh takes a long view of swollen rivers, from colonial embankments to post-independence water projects, showing how every attempt to tame their fury has only deepened their claim on Punjab’s destiny.

Sandeep Singh follows with “Curse of the Cusecs,” a ground report from the farms and fields where floods wipe out crops, livelihoods and hope. Meanwhile, political battles rage over reservoirs and water-sharing. He revisits the echoes of 1988, when accusations against the Bhakra Beas Management Board over deliberate flooding culminated in bloodshed, a reminder of how water itself can become a weapon.

This edition also brings Snighdendhu Bhattacharya’s ground report from Nepal, a sharp legal update from Nizam Pasha on the Supreme Court’s (interim) ruling on Wakf properties, and, in our regular section Overlap, a chilling exploration of how lakes in India are turning into potential weapons of mass destruction under the pressure of climate change.

Together, these stories draw a map of boundaries—generational, geographical, ecological and political—and show what happens when those boundaries are crossed, challenged or erased.