1. The Serene Morning That Turned into a Nightmare In the lush, undulating hills of Madikeri, where the Western Ghats paint a breathtaking canvas of emerald coffee plantations and misty valleys, life usually moves at the pace of a gentle breeze. The air is thick with the scent of wet earth and ripe coffee cherries, and the only sounds are the rustling of leaves, the chirping of unseen birds, and the distant hum of a stream. For the workers at the Kusuburu estate, the morning of that fateful Friday began like any other. They woke before dawn, their hands calloused…

Social media has handed us—Gen Z especially—an incredible gift: the ability to access more information, from more perspectives, in less time than any previous generation could have imagined. We can scroll through breaking news, watch a lecture from a Nobel laureate, fact-check a politician in seconds, and hear voices that used to be silenced. But this gift has a shadow. The same open highways that allow knowledge to travel also allow falsehoods to spread at unprecedented speed. It’s like being given a library where every aisle also has a loudspeaker playing someone’s confident guess. A misleading video can reach millions…