https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-existential-psychology-of-viktor-frankl/  freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning in life. 

Viktor Frankl: Youngsters need challenges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImonPWt7VOA .   we are living in a society which seeks to  virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need except for one need the most basic and fundamental need --  the need for meaning. 
  if there is a meaning , if it becomes cognizant of such a meaning then we are ready to suffer, offer sacrifices, undergo tension stress and so forth .. What young people need our ideals and challenges personal tasks..to begin with in the first place  examples personal examples of challenges faced.  Today  teacchers, parents, leaders   don't venture to confront them with anything because they might become angry .  Neither parents nor school teachers are courageous enough to challenge them the hold or  arouse tensions. 

In the death camp, they gave him a number: 119104.
But the thing they tried hardest to kill became the very thing that saved millions.
1942. Vienna.
Viktor Frankl was 37 years old, a respected psychiatrist with a growing practice, a manuscript nearly complete, and a wife named Tilly whose laugh could fill a room.
He had a chance to escape to America. A visa. A way out.
But his elderly parents couldn't come with him. So he stayed.
Within months, the Nazis came for them all.
Theresienstadt. Then Auschwitz. Then Dachau.
The manuscript he'd spent years writing—sewn carefully into the lining of his coat—was torn away within hours of arrival.
His life's work. His purpose. Reduced to ash.
His clothes were taken. His hair shaved. His name erased.
On the intake form, there was only a number: 119104.
But here's what the guards didn't understand:
You can take a man's manuscript. You can take his name. You can take everything he owns.
But you cannot take what he knows.
And Viktor Frankl knew something about the human mind that would keep him alive—and give birth to a revolution in psychology.
He noticed a pattern.
In the camps, men didn't just die from starvation or disease.
They died from giving up.
The moment a prisoner lost his reason to survive—his why—his body would collapse within days. The doctors had a term for it: "give-up-itis."
But the men who held onto something—a wife to find, a child to see again, a book to write, a debt to repay, a promise to keep—they endured unthinkable suffering.
The difference wasn't physical strength.
It was meaning.
So Frankl began an experiment.
Not in a laboratory. In the barracks.
He would approach men on the edge of despair and whisper:
"Who is waiting for you?"
"What work is left unfinished?"
"What would you tell your son about surviving this?"
He couldn't offer food. He couldn't promise freedom. He had nothing material to give.
But he offered something the guards could never confiscate: a reason to see tomorrow.
One man remembered his daughter. He survived to find her.
Another remembered a scientific problem he'd been working on. He survived to solve it.
Frankl himself survived by mentally reconstructing his lost manuscript—page by page, paragraph by paragraph, in the darkness of the barracks.
April 1945. Liberation.
Viktor Frankl weighed 85 pounds. His ribs showed through his skin.
Tilly was gone. His mother—gone. His brother—gone.
Everything he'd loved had been murdered.
He had every reason to despair. Every reason to give up.
Instead, he sat down and began writing.
Nine days.
That's how long it took him to recreate his manuscript from memory—the one the Nazis had destroyed three years earlier.
But now it contained something the original didn't:
Proof.
Living, breathing, undeniable proof that his theory was true.
He called it Logotherapy—therapy through meaning.
The foundation was simple but revolutionary:
Humans can survive almost anything if they have a reason why.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." (He borrowed the words from Nietzsche, but he had proven them in hell.)
1946. The book is published.
In German, the title was "...trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen"—"...Nevertheless Say Yes to Life."
In English, it became "Man's Search for Meaning."
The world wasn't ready for it. Publishers initially rejected it. "Too morbid," they said. "Who wants to read about concentration camps?"
But slowly, quietly, it began to spread.
Therapists read it and wept.
Prisoners read it and found hope.
People facing divorce, disease, bankruptcy, depression—they read it and discovered that their suffering could have purpose.
The impact was seismic.
The book has now been translated into over 50 languages.
It's sold more than 16 million copies.
The Library of Congress named it one of the ten most influential books in America.
But here's what matters more than sales numbers:
Countless people—people whose names we'll never know—have picked up this book in their darkest moment and found a reason to keep going.
Because Viktor Frankl proved something the Nazis tried to disprove:
You can strip away everything from a human being—freedom, family, food, future, hope—and there will still be one final freedom remaining:
The freedom to choose what it all means.
You cannot control what happens to you.
But you can always control what you make of what happens to you.

Today, Viktor Frankl is gone.
But in hospital rooms, in therapy offices, in prisons, in quiet moments when someone is deciding whether to give up or keep going—his words are still there:
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."
The Nazis gave him a number.
History gave him immortality.
Because the man who lost everything taught the world that meaning is the one thing no one can ever take away.
Prisoner 119104 didn't just survive.
He turned suffering itself into a source of healing.
And somewhere tonight, someone who's barely holding on will read his words and decide to hold on one more day.
That's not just survival.
That's victory over death itself.

India’s demographic story is no longer one of uniform population growth but of sharp regional variations. While the southern states are ageing rapidly and outward migration from them is slowing, the northern states are experiencing a youth bulge that is reshaping labour outflows. This emerging north-south divide could redefine India’s migration dynamics and it holds economic implications, particularly for remittances and labour supply to West Asia.

Overall, as India’s internal demographic divide deepens, the key challenge will be to ensure that the migration potential of the north’s youth is matched by the skill and policy support once enjoyed by the south. Unless this is addressed, India’s next migration story may be one of quantity without quality, where we will still see a flow of workers but without the same economic multiplier that once made Kerala’s Gulf connection a global success story. https://thewire.in/labour/youthful-north-ageing-south-the-demography-reshaping-indias-gulf-story 

by Akshat Sogani

30/10/2025

A political drama for the ages, opening soon in New York City: Zohran Mamdani v Donald Trump. What could go wrong?  https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/28/a-political-drama-for-the-ages-opening-soon-in-new-york-city  

“It’s not your job to change their mind,”  “It’s your job to leave them thinking that Zohran’s people are classy.” Meeting sceptics with smiles...    He has made his affordability platform—rent freezes, housing investment, free child care, free buses—the main story of the election, while avoiding culture-war traps and shouting matches with Donald Trump, who calls him a communist.   

At a minimum, if Mr Mamdani is elected, the White House will probably make a midterms-focused spectacle of the mayor’s unabashed socialism, to undermine suburban New York Democrats running for closely contested seats in the House of Representatives next year, races that may help decide whether Democrats regain control of the lower house of Congress. Yet if Mr Trump freezes more federal funds .. or if he sends soldiers and border-control agents to his former hometown, he would be taking on his own political risks.