21 July marks American Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway’s (1899 -1961) 127th birth anniversary. Hemingway’s caveats about the mindless killing that war unleashes seem to resonate uncannily in contemporary times, when war has phenomenally gained in prominence as a smart and swift way of global profiteering. The geo-political eco-system reverberates with the lust for stupendous profit at the cost of waging wars that destroy lives, ruin the environment and exploit the helpless, marginalized people of the world without impunity.

The 21st century wars have now cunningly outsmarted the 20th century ones that killed millions of people for no fault of their own. We are witnesses to wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan. The list goes on and the shift in the theatres of war are significant – Ethiopia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Sahel region, have been identified as among the world’s top conflict escalation hotspots by the Global Peace Index 2025’.

As 2026 is the ye ar when Hemingway’s first published novel The Sun Also Rises, that foregrounded the trauma and devastation of war, turns 100, one wonders whether from 1926 to 2026, through these ten decades, civilization has matured and mellowed or escalated into abysmal depths. In mid-2026, we still are witness to mass murders, targeted killings and programmed wars. Terrorism flourishes as a global and local establishment, funded by vested interests, leveraging monetization through the arms trade that is indivisibly linked to the politics of power.

It would be delusional to disagree with Hemingway’s anti-war arguments: “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of  political and economic opportunists.” Hence in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the young men and women of the 1920s, who were absolutely traumatized by the impact of the first world war, were described as “members of the Lost Generation”.

In an essay in Esquire, Hemingway had remarked, “(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote........

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