Dear readers,
Six months is not a lifetime. It is barely a season and a half. It lacks the symmetry of a year or the gravitas of an anniversary cast in bronze. And yet, in the life of a publication, particularly one built on borrowed time, student resolve, and a faith that sometimes feels like an endangered resource, it is long enough to feel like a small epoch. It is the period in which an idea discovers whether it wishes to endure. It is long enough for a habit to take root, for a rhythm to emerge, for an idea, once tentative and small, to begin, just begin, to resemble an institution.
When we launched this paper, it wasn’t with a trumpet blast or the illusion that the world had been waiting, breath held, for one more masthead. If anything, it began with a quieter impulse, a little audacity, and a belief that honest work, patient work, could still be done. That students could, with a certain seriousness of purpose, write their way into the conversation and build a space where thoughtfulness might prevail over haste, where language mattered, and where curiosity wasn’t merely ornamental but central to the project. That work requires more than talent. It requires constancy: the willingness to show up when the story is complicated, when the deadlines blur into the late hours, when the world refuses to slow down to match your capacity.
And what has sustained this publication is the steady, unglamorous constancy of the people who stayed. There is a particular grace in watching a team develop its own instincts, writers and editors who understand that journalism is not performance but practice: slow, deliberate, and even occasionally exhausting. On nights when the news, in its stubborn way, refused to sleep, we learned to do something countercultural: to pause, to rest the newsroom, to return the next morning with clearer eyes. Fatigue, when it arrives, has a way of clarifying why the work matters.
There have also been moments when the enterprise felt larger than the hours available to contain it. That, too, is part of the education. To build anything, especially as students, is to discover how much stamina is stitched into belief. And yet, what has remained, through the fatigue, the learning, and the adjustments, is a sense of being moved by the collective effort. You begin with a notion. You look up one afternoon and realize it now has a life, a voice, a temperament of its own.
The past six months have shown that the work of building a newsroom is not merely literary or logistical; it is civic. To publish is to assert that truth exists, however contested; that facts matter, even when they are inconvenient; and that words, arranged carefully and honestly, can still resist the flattening pressure of propaganda and spectacle. Journalism, even in its most local or campus-bound form, insists that public life be taken seriously.
Politics, after all, is not confined to legislatures or rallies. It is present in the way institutions are built, in who gets a voice and who does not, in the willingness to question received wisdom and to sit with uncomfortable truths. A student-run publication is, in its own way, a rehearsal for citizenship: a place to practice inquiry, dissent, nuance, and the discipline of evidence. To write is to participate. To edit is to care about how meaning is shaped. To read attentively is to refuse indifference.
And yet, building such a space means accepting the weather that comes with it. New institutions, especially those run by students, do not always enjoy the luxury of patience from the world around them. Scrutiny arrives early, expectations arrive fully formed, and departures sometimes come at the first sign that the work is harder than imagined. This is not a complaint; it is a simple observation about the age we inhabit. Ours is a time that demands instant polish and instant success. But democratic culture, like good reporting, rarely moves at that speed.
To our readers: you form the democratic half of this exchange. The fact that you return, not out of habit but with curiosity, grants this publication its purpose. You read generously and critically, and you allow room for growth without denying the standards by which any serious work should be judged. That trust is not incidental or ornamental. It is the foundation.
We do not imagine ourselves finished. A student-run publication should remain alert to the world, porous to new ideas, humble in the face of what it does not yet know. The hope is not perfection, but seriousness: the kind that makes room for empathy, precision, and the occasional well-earned silence.
Six months in, I find myself less interested in declaring what LU.Chronicles has achieved than in recognizing what it has revealed: that even India’s first student-run daily can begin as a fragile idea, that a small group of people, working with intention, can create a space where thought is allowed to deepen rather than evaporate. That alone is worthy of care.
So thank you for reading, slowly when you can, critically when you must, and always with the understanding that this is a shared endeavor. The experiment continues. And we go on, not with fanfare, but with the quiet conviction that the work is worth doing.
It is not a culmination. It is a beginning still. Ahead of us lie bigger questions, deeper reporting, essays that risk more, voices that will broaden the moral and imaginative borders of what we do. The task is not simply to chronicle events or opinions, but to help make sense of the ever-expanding tangle of culture, politics, art, and daily life. That work requires patience. It requires empathy. And it requires the belief, perhaps naive but necessary, that the written word remains one of the last great instruments of democratic imagination. In the spirit that first set this paper in motion, we keep to a simple conviction: lucem sequimur — we follow the light.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for thinking alongside us. Let us see what the next six months, and the many beyond them, might allow us to build together.
— Editor-in-Chief