In ordinary times, a year in the life of a nation is a sentence in history, at the most. Not applicable to 2001. It is a four-digit chapter on surviving the Evil, on living as a memorial service to the dead, on the fury of faith and earth, on the nation united by unsolicited terror. Terror, the word has become so banal, as if those alphabets can no longer contain the idea it carries. The year 2001 has challenged the limits of description.

As on September 11 in the United States of America. That day, as the towering inferno in New York illuminated the rage of radical faith, almost every one in this world, except those who lived in the slums and caves of civilisation, became an American. The sorrow was not nationally exceptionable, the enemy was targeting a way of life that its darkened mind didn't acknowledge. The Evil, a religious concept that has been periodically personalised by history, as in, say the gulags and Auschwitz, has staged a millennial comeback. Though this time it didn't have a face, it did not have a geographically identifiable empire. It was a life-denying, scripturally manipulated idea.

But one caveman claimed ownership, and his face, immortalised in grainy videotapes of nihilistic prophecies, gave a shape to evil, currently spelt as Osama bin Laden. The year 2001 saw a nation rising out of the charred symbolism of its power and going after the landlords of evil. America's just war in Afghanistan brought an inglorious end to radical Islamism, its bloody lies and pretence-and brought laughter and song back to a country scarred by conquests. Religion's simulated savagery is no match for the mobilised sense of the nation, says 2001.

For India, the action was not entirely elsewhere. The distance between September 11 and December 13 has been reduced by the unequally distributed energy of the Evil. For the Indian democracy, the attack on Parliament carried out by the soldiers of bin Ladenism was an assault on its national soul. But the idea of India, as the idea of America, is not so fragile as to collapse under the rage of the civilisationally challenged. Still, 2001 was a stark reminder to the country: beware, the enemy doesn't sleep. India, too, can't, in peace. In India, though, the biggest killer came through the subterranean corridors of an earth cracked open. In Gujarat. Death wanted to be spectacular in 2001.

The struggle of man against power, wrote a novelist, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The following pages of India Today are a testimony, in words and images. For India and the world, the struggle against the Evil goes on and on, beyond 2001.