Justice moves at the speed of a dial-up modem in a fiber-optic world.

It took twenty-two years. That’s roughly five generations of hardware cycles, the entire rise and fall of the DVD, and the total disintegration of what we used to call a private life. For Siddhartha Reddy, the clock finally ran out this week. The Supreme Court of India just upheld his conviction in the 2002 suicide of Telugu actress Pratyusha. In the time it took the gavel to finally hit the desk, the world she left behind has become unrecognizable.

Back in 2002, Pratyusha was the "next big thing" in an industry that eats its young. She was twenty. She had the kind of face that casting directors call "luminous" right before they exploit it. Then came the "suicide pact." It’s a classic, grim trope of the star-crossed variety: two lovers, a bottle of pesticide, and a promise to go out together because the world wouldn’t let them be together.

Except the script leaked. Or rather, it failed.

Pratyusha drank the poison and died. Reddy drank it, or claimed to, and lived. The legal system has been chewing on that discrepancy for over two decades. The trial court gave him five years. The High Court, in a move that felt like a software patch nobody asked for, downgraded the charge and the sentence to two years. Now, the Supreme Court has looked at the telemetry and decided the original conviction for abetment of suicide holds water.

It’s a win for the family, sure. But "victory" is a heavy word when it carries a twenty-two-year price tag. Think about the overhead on that. The legal fees, the wasted years of appellate ping-pong, the sheer emotional bandwidth required to keep a grudge warm for two decades. In the tech world, we complain if a page takes three seconds to load. We demand instant patches for minor bugs. But when the bug is a human life and the platform is the Indian judiciary, you learn to wait. You wait until the world has forgotten the victim’s filmography. You wait until the "rising star" would have been a middle-aged industry veteran.

The friction here isn't just in the law. It’s in the memory. In 2002, there was no Twitter to organize a hashtag campaign. There was no TikTok to dissect the forensics in a sixty-second clip. There was just the local press, the police reports, and the silence of a house in Film Nagar. Today, we’d have a three-part Netflix docuseries before the first autopsy report was even filed. We’ve traded the slow, agonizing grind of the courts for the lightning-fast, often wrong, court of public opinion.

Neither system works particularly well. One is a meat grinder that takes twenty years to produce a burger; the other is a microwave that catches fire if you put the wrong person in it.

Reddy’s defense tried to argue that there was no "active" provocation. They wanted the court to believe it was a tragedy of mutual consent, a tragic glitch in a romantic OS. The Supreme Court didn't buy the update. They saw the "instigation." They saw the power dynamic. They saw a woman who is now a footnote in a legal textbook rather than a name on a marquee.

The sentence is six months of rigorous imprisonment and a fine. Six months. That’s the "trade-off" the system settled on after two decades of deliberation. It feels like a rounding error. It’s the equivalent of a slap on the wrist for a data breach that leaked the souls of millions. We spent twenty-two years of state resources to put a man behind bars for less time than it takes to develop a mediocre mobile game.

Is this what we call closure? Or is it just the point where the system gets tired of the file being open?

We like to think that progress—tech, social, legal—moves us toward something more efficient. We have facial recognition, instant messaging, and AI that can predict a crime before it happens. Yet, here we are, still cleaning up the wreckage of 2002 with tools that feel like they belong in the Middle Ages. The conviction is upheld. The file is closed. The servers are finally being spun down on a tragedy that survived four presidencies and a digital revolution.

You have to wonder if Reddy even remembers the man he was when he made that pact, or if he’s just a ghost haunted by a version of himself he can no longer access.

Does anyone actually win when the "undo" button takes twenty-two years to click?