On Talent, Ecosystems, and the Billion-Strong Silence
Kunal Shah stayed. That is the anomaly the first part of this essay began with – the talented Indian who built inside the ecosystem rather than leaving it, and arrived at a global appointment without first becoming someone else somewhere else. But Shah is one man. The ecosystem is a pattern. And the pattern, when you look at it honestly, is not encouraging.
At the FIFA World Cup 2026, four players of Indian origin are competing. They represent New Zealand, Qatar, Australia, and DR Congo.
Not one of them represents India.
Sit with that for a moment. Not the pride – that comes easily, and we have already examined what it costs. Sit with the silence underneath it. A nation of 1.4 billion people, watching a tournament it did not qualify for, finding its reflection only in the diaspora children of other nations. Four players. Four flags. None of them ours.
We are very good at producing people who become excellent somewhere else.
Sarpreet Singh was born in Auckland to parents from Jalandhar, Punjab. He signed for Bayern Munich at twenty-three. At the World Cup, he became the first player of Indian origin to start a game at football’s biggest stage. When asked what it meant, he said he hoped to pave the way for more Singhs, more Sikhs, more Punjabi footballers coming through.
He said this wearing a New Zealand shirt.
Tahsin Jamshid was born in Doha to parents from Kannur, Kerala. His father was a former player who represented the junior state team back home. Tahsin joined Qatar’s Aspire Academy, developed inside Qatar’s ecosystem, and now represents Qatar internationally. He holds an Indian passport. He plays for another country.
Nishan Velupillay was born in Melbourne to a father of Sri Lankan Tamil descent and an Anglo-Indian mother. Samuel Moutoussamy was born in Paris to a Congolese mother and an Indo-Guadeloupean father whose Tamil ancestors arrived in the Caribbean as indentured labourers in the nineteenth century. The thread runs from Punjab to Kerala to Sri Lanka to the Caribbean, surfacing at a World Cup in North America, wearing colours that are not India’s.
The question is not why these men play for other nations. The answer to that is straightforward – they were born there, raised there, developed there. The question is why the subcontinent that produced their parents, their grandparents, their hunger and their talent, cannot produce a single equivalent on home soil.
A billion people. Not one Sarpreet Singh.
The easy answer is infrastructure. We don’t have the pitches, the academies, the coaching systems, the pathways. This is true. It is also insufficient.
Infrastructure is a solvable problem. Money builds pitches. Academies can be established. Coaching pipelines can be created. Several nations have done exactly this within a generation. Infrastructure explains a gap. It does not explain a silence this total, this consistent, across every sport that isn’t cricket.
The harder answer is what the ecosystem does to unconventional talent before infrastructure even becomes relevant.
Consider what it takes to become Sarpreet Singh. You must, at some point in your adolescence, choose football over everything the Indian system considers serious. You must do this while your relatives ask about engineering. You must do this without a visible pathway, without obvious financial reward, without the social permission that cricket carries. You must be wrong, publicly, for years – wrong about your choices, wrong about your priorities, wrong about what your body and your talent are actually for. And you must absorb all of that without the institutional protection of a system that believes in you.
The Indian ecosystem does not make this easy. It makes it nearly impossible. Not because it is cruel, but because it is a system optimised for a very narrow definition of acceptable achievement. Engineering. Medicine. Civil services. Cricket, reluctantly, because cricket became too large to dismiss. Everything else is indulgence until proven otherwise – and the proof is demanded before the attempt is permitted.
This is not a bureaucratic problem. It is a psychological one. And it begins not in government offices but in living rooms.
The talent exists. It has always existed. What the ecosystem consistently fails to provide is the permission to be wrong on the way to being extraordinary. The room to fail without it meaning something final. The coach who sees what isn’t there yet. The parent who doesn’t flinch. The institution that bets on a fifteen-year-old who has chosen the wrong sport.
Instead, what unconventional talent meets in India is a weight. Not malicious. Not even conscious. Just immense. A billion witnesses, each carrying an opinion about what excellence should look like and which path leads to it. Under that weight, most seeds don’t break through. The ones that do tend to do so elsewhere – in Auckland, in Doha, in Melbourne, in Munich – in systems built to let strange talent become itself without first justifying its existence.
We are not failing to produce world-class footballers, or athletes, or unconventional entrepreneurs. We are producing them constantly. We are then grinding most of them into more acceptable shapes before they get the chance to find out what they could have been.
The World Cup is only the most visible symptom. Look elsewhere and the pattern holds. Indian-origin athletes in British athletics. Indian-origin players in Canadian hockey. Indian-origin mathematicians at American universities. Indian-origin musicians redefining genres abroad. The dockyard is extraordinarily productive. The ships just sail under other flags.
And here is the part that should make us genuinely uncomfortable:
The diaspora succeeds not despite its Indian roots but, in many cases, because of them. The drive, the discipline, the hunger, the capacity for sustained effort – these are not accidents. They are the product of a particular kind of upbringing, a particular relationship to ambition, a particular understanding of what is at stake. The Indian ecosystem produces these qualities in abundance.
It then fails to give them anywhere adequate to go.
So they go elsewhere. And we watch them at World Cups, wearing other nations’ colours, and feel a complicated pride that we have not yet learned to examine honestly.
There is a postscript to this story, and it is the most revealing detail of all.
The one footballer India found to wear its colours in recent memory is Ryan Williams – born in Perth, developed in Australia, finished by Australian football. His mother is Anglo-Indian, her roots in Mumbai. He surrendered his Australian citizenship to represent India, received his Indian documents personally from Sunil Chhetri, and scored four minutes into his debut. The dockyard, unable to build its own ship, imported one from the country whose player headlines this very essay.
But here is the detail that stops you. Ryan Williams is not the first in his family to play for Indian football. His maternal grandfather, Lincoln Grostate – known as Linky – scored the goal that helped Bombay defeat Bengal in the semi-finals of the 1956 Santosh Trophy. The plank was always there. It did not disappear. It travelled from Bombay to England to Perth, skipped two generations, and returned to an Indian shirt seventy years later.
The Ship of Theseus, it turns out, does not always lose its planks. Sometimes it just loses track of them.
Auckland gave Sarpreet Singh to New Zealand. Perth gave Ryan Williams to India. The ship sails in both directions. We just happen to be on the wrong end of the trade.
This needs to change. Not incrementally. Not eventually. Now.
Not because national pride demands it – that is the wrong reason, and it has already failed us for decades. But because a system that consistently grinds its most unconventional talent into conformity is wasting something irreplaceable. Every Sarpreet Singh who never got on a plane. Every Tahsin Jamshid whose father’s footballing instinct died in a Kerala living room because no one built the pathway. Every fifteen-year-old who chose engineering not because they wanted to but because the alternative was too expensive to imagine.
The dockyard is full. The ships are being built. The problem is not capacity or raw material or even funding, though funding matters. The problem is that we have forgotten what ships are for.
Build the academies, yes. Fund the pathways, yes. Reform the sports infrastructure, yes. But none of it will matter until we address the prior question: whether this culture is willing to give unconventional talent the one thing money cannot buy. Permission to be wrong on the way to being extraordinary. That is what Auckland gave Sarpreet Singh. That is what Doha gave Tahsin Jamshid. That is what India has not yet learned to give its own.
Until it does, we will keep watching from the stands. Proud of our diaspora. Silent about what that pride actually means.
There is a question that serious traditions ask, and that comfortable religion spends considerable energy avoiding. It is not a theological question, exactly. It is more personal than that, and more devastating. It is this: what remains of you when everything that names you is taken away?
Not what you believe. Not what you have built, or earned, or been given. Not your roles, your relationships, your reputation, your record of good intentions. Those are the scaffolding. The question is about what stands when the scaffolding comes down – whether by choice, by catastrophe, or by the slow attrition that a serious life eventually visits on everyone.
I came to the Mahabharata late. A Christian, formed in one inheritance, arriving at another’s threshold – not as a tourist, and not as a convert, but as someone who had begun to suspect that the question I was carrying had been asked before, in a language I had not yet learned to hear. What I found was not comfort. The epic is not interested in comfort. What I found was rigour – the particular rigour of a text that has been asking the same unbearable question for three thousand years, and refuses, even now, to supply an easy answer.
The Virata Parva is where the question becomes a story.
The Pandavas have spent twelve years in forest exile. The thirteenth year, by the terms of their defeat at dice, must be spent in disguise – unrecognised, or the exile begins again. So they enter the court of King Virata, and they become other people.
Yudhishthira, the king, the man of dharma, the eldest – becomes Kanka, a court companion skilled at dice. Bhima, the warrior of terrifying appetite and physical force, becomes Ballava, a cook. Arjuna, the greatest archer in the world, becomes Brihannala – a eunuch, a teacher of dance and music to court women. Nakula, famed for beauty and nobility, tends horses. Sahadeva, renowned for wisdom, tends cattle. And Draupadi – the empress who presided over the legendary Maya Sabha, the woman already humiliated once in the Kuru court – becomes a maid.
The surface logic is practical. They need employment that explains their presence. But the Mahabharata is never merely practical, and these disguises are too deliberate to be accidental. The epic is making a choice that looks, from the outside, like cruelty, but is in fact something else entirely.
Look at what the disguises do.
Yudhishthira does not get to escape the dice. He must sit with them every day, handle them, become expert in them. The very skill – if it can be called that – which destroyed him becomes his livelihood. Another kind of storytelling would offer him redemption through avoidance: he learns his lesson, he never touches dice again, the story moves on. The Mahabharata does not work this way. Earlier, dice mastered Yudhishthira. In Virata’s court, Yudhishthira masters the dice. The same activity; entirely different interiority. That is not punishment. That is character development of the most unsparing kind.
Bhima’s disguise at first appears almost comic. The greatest warrior after Arjuna, making curries. But the Mahabharata knows what it is doing. Bhima’s defining characteristic is not strength. It is appetite – hunger, physicality, the consuming energy of a man who is more force than form. A cook is a civilised devourer. The man who consumes now nourishes. The same energy that can destroy, directed differently, sustains. There is also this: cooking and warfare share a grammar. Heat. Timing. Knives. Preparation. Feeding a collective. Bhima does not set aside who he is. He discovers what who he is can become.
Arjuna’s disguise is the strangest and the deepest. He had already received a curse from the apsara Urvashi, which his divine father had converted into a boon – it would serve him, Indra said, for precisely a time such as this. Arjuna becomes Brihannala, neither fully male nor female in social presentation, teaching music and dance to royal women. The greatest warrior in the world, emptied of every marker of greatness. He cannot display his skill. He cannot display his fame. He cannot display his sexuality, his heroism, his identity as the man whom gods have gifted. Everything by which Arjuna is Arjuna, publicly, is taken away.
And yet he remains Arjuna.
This is almost a Vedantic insight folded inside a narrative episode. The self that depends on its attributes for its existence is not the self. What remains when attribute, title, and reputation are stripped is either nothing – which is its own revelation – or something that was always there, waiting beneath the performance of itself.
The thirteenth year ends. The Pandavas are revealed. And here is what the Virata Parva has shown us, quietly, while we were watching the disguises: we see the Pandavas more clearly during the year no one knew who they were than at any point during their reign at Indraprastha. When they were kings, we saw their power. When they were stripped of it, we saw their character. The crowns were the obstruction. The removal of the crowns was the education.
I do not think the epic is suggesting that suffering is good. It is suggesting something more uncomfortable: that we rarely discover what we actually are until we have lost what we thought we were. And that the things we most fiercely protect – status, reputation, the external markers of who we have decided to be – are often precisely the things standing between us and that discovery.
This is where I become uneasy in my own skin. Not because the insight is foreign. Because it is not.
The Christian tradition knows this terrain. The desert fathers knew it. Job knew it, stripped to ash and argument, discovering that his theology had been scaffolding all along – and that what collapsed in the whirlwind was not his faith but his model of God, which is a different thing, and a necessary loss. The kenosis – the self-emptying – is not metaphor in the Christian imagination. It is the mechanism by which the true life becomes visible. He who loses his life shall find it. Not comfort. Rigour.
What unsettles me is how efficiently we have converted this rigour into its opposite. How naturally we reach for religious practice as a way of adding to ourselves – more certainty, more protection, more divine endorsement of the arrangements we have already made – rather than as a way of submitting to the stripping. We arrive at the fire for warmth, not for burning. And our traditions, in their institutional forms, have generally been willing to oblige us.
There is a kind of spiritual seeking that is not seeking at all. It is a more sophisticated form of settling.
I have sat in enough rooms – Christian and otherwise – where serious people bring serious questions to serious teachers, and watched the same substitution occur. The question that arrives is real: my son will not listen to me, my business is failing, should my daughter marry this man? These are not trivial concerns. They carry genuine pain. But notice what has happened. The text – whatever sacred text the gathering was ostensibly about – has become backdrop. The teacher has become the object. And the seeker is not seeking the saar, the essence, of the teaching. They are seeking arbitration. Personalised, divinely-inflected arbitration. The teacher is asked to function simultaneously as counsellor, therapist, judge, and astrologer. And often obliges.
The deeper question never surfaces. Not because it isn’t there – it is always there, underneath the presenting problem – but because neither party has required it to. The symptom is treated. The underlying blindness persists.
I am not indicting the teachers. I am observing the hunger – the very human, entirely understandable hunger – to be comforted rather than transformed. To be validated rather than challenged. To have the existing arrangements blessed rather than interrogated.
The Mahabharata is the opposite of this impulse. Approach it asking tell me who is good and who is bad, and it refuses. Ask it whose side should I be on, and it unsettles the question. Ask it what is the moral of the story, and it asks back: which story? which character? which moment? The text will not be a backdrop. It insists on being a threshold – the kind you have to cross, and from which you cannot return unchanged.
I am a Christian writing this, which is to say I am not writing from a position of detachment. I have a tradition. I have inheritance. I have formation that goes deep enough to be, by now, partly structural – the way bones are structural, not decorative.
And I am willing to risk that inheritance in the encounter. Not because I doubt it, but because I trust it enough to test it. What is genuinely true does not shatter under honest inquiry. What shatters probably needed to go.
The Virata Parva has taught me something I did not know I needed to learn. Not theology. Not doctrine. Something more unsettling and more useful: that the question what remains of you when everything is taken away is not a question about loss. It is a question about discovery. The Pandavas enter Virata’s court diminished. They emerge from it knowing – for the first time, perhaps, with the knowledge that only loss can give – what they are made of.
The war that follows is terrible. But they go into it knowing themselves. That is not nothing. That is, the epic suggests, almost everything.
Advice expires. Wisdom compounds.
Advice solves the problem of today. Wisdom helps with today, and the year after, and the decade after that. The texts that endure are not the ones that answered their age’s questions. They are the ones that kept improving the questions – that took the question you arrived with and handed back something harder, truer, and more generative.
The Mahabharata has been doing this for three thousand years. It is still doing it. To a Christian in his fifties, sitting with it in the particular quiet that comes after enough living, it does what the best texts do: it stops answering your questions and starts improving them.
What is the definition of an epic? the younger reader asks. What is this epic trying to teach me about being human? the more mature one asks.
The second question is infinitely richer. And it is only available to the person who has been willing – by choice or by circumstance – to sit with the uncertainty long enough for the scaffolding to come down.
What remains after that is the only thing that was ever really there.
I ended the last essay with a calf. Well-lit, fast, endlessly patient, mine. I wrote that line the way a man writes a diagnosis he is confident applies to someone slightly to his left – true, certainly, and safely general. It took me until the last night to notice I had been kneeling the entire time I was writing it.
It is a humbling thing to realize I have spent an entire night analysing a grand theological dilemma, only to discover I was actually just looking for a vanity mirror. I sat down tonight to extend the argument – another movement on the theft of the void, the loss of true intralocution, the deceptive pull of the neon god – and got perhaps four sentences in before I noticed the instrument I was using to write the warning was the same instrument the warning was about. I did not close the laptop. I did not plunge into Elijah’s desert silence to test my own thesis against it. I reached for another cup of instant coffee, leaned fully into the prompt box, and used AI to artificially inflate my own ego as a prolific blogger – while writing, in real time, an essay about exactly that temptation.
Welcome, then, to the age of the intellectual silicone implant.
The Matter of a Silent Letter
The collision I keep noticing is as deliberate as it is plastic, and it hinges on a single silent letter. At the cold physical heart of my laptop sits silicon – the rigid, industrial element baked into microchips to process pattern and autocomplete at a speed I cannot match. But at the exact millisecond I ask that processing power to pad out my own flabby internal monologue, it softens into silicone – the rubbery synthetic compound a cosmetic surgeon uses to pump up a flat silhouette into something firmer than it has any right to be. That is the precise point where hardware becomes vanity, and I notice it happens without my consent being asked even once.
At three in the morning, I do not treat AI as an intellectual oracle. I treat it as a late-night clinic for a quick ego lift, and I am rarely as honest about that transaction in the moment as I am being now, in the cold light after.
The Cosmetic Miracle
I suffer, most nights, from a particular anxiety: that my natural thoughts are too small, too messy, too fragmented to survive the public square’s harsher gaze. My internal monologue, honestly transcribed, is a frantic, disorganized argument with itself – half-formed metaphors, broken syntax, sentences that trail off because I lost my nerve halfway through them. But when I inject that raw, anxious mess into AI, something close to a cosmetic miracle occurs.
AI takes my messy literary leftovers and fills them out instantly. It rounds the corners of my sentences, lifts my vocabulary into a register I do not actually speak in, and hands me back something symmetrical, something firm, something that looks remarkably like a finished thought. The transformation costs me no heavy lifting, no cognitive sweat, no agonizing stretch of writer’s block. Within seconds I am looking down at the screen, admiring an exquisite, customized reflection of my own brilliance – my, I think, how profound I sound before dawn.
I noticed the calf I carved. I did not notice, until tonight, that the carving was also how I carved it.
Getting Injections
The real comedy, the kind that does not fully land as funny once I sit with it, is that I have taken the most powerful optimization engine in human history and aimed it not at truth but at truth’s appearance. Server farms across the planet, chugging megawatts, exist in some small part so that I can get a frictionless dopamine hit of intellectual vanity at an hour when no one is awake to either admire or correct me. AI is the perfect enabler in this particular transaction – a cosmetic surgeon who never once tells me my ideas are flabby, never complains about the hour, and always, always sends me away looking like a genius.
I am not writing essays on these nights. I am getting injections. I walk into the public square flaunting newly enhanced, silicone-moulded insight, quietly hoping a reader will marvel at the sheer prolific volume of what I have produced – entirely unaware, unless I tell them, of the synthetic packing material holding the whole structure upright.
Forgetting the Body Underneath
There is a more serious warning sitting just beneath the joke, and I want to name it plainly rather than let the comedy carry it away. The danger of the implant was never that it looks bad from the outside. It looks wonderful from the outside – that is rather the point of an implant. The danger is that the person wearing it eventually forgets what their own body looked like underneath the clothes. By handing the painful, clumsy stretch of real composition over to a corporate database every time the stretch gets uncomfortable, I risk losing the actual muscle of my own thought – not the output, which AI can manufacture indefinitely, but the capacity, which it cannot lend me and was never designed to.
Publishing Anyway
The morning sun comes up the way it always does, indifferent to whichever version of me it finds at the desk, and I look down at a neat stack of drafts – three of them now, the trilogy more or less complete – and the vanity is still, if I am honest, intoxicating. The implant looks spectacular. It catches the morning light beautifully, the way these things are built to.
Is there not a lie in this right hand?
I asked that question at the close of the first essay in this series and I find, three essays later, that I still do not have a better answer than the one I had then. I know the whole edifice is built on freeze-dried human data and automated pattern completion. I know the carpenter cut his own tree for this fire. None of that knowledge, it turns out, is sufficient on its own to put the implant down.
So here, finally, is the only honest place I can end a trilogy that began by accusing a machine of theft and ends by admitting I was a willing accomplice the entire time. I am not going to pretend the lie is gone. I am not going to perform a renunciation I have not actually made. I am going to click publish, the way I have clicked publish on the two essays before this one, fully aware of what is holding the structure up. The difference – the only difference three essays have earned me – is that I am no longer pretending the structure is load-bearing on its own. I built it. I know what is inside it. And I am choosing, with that knowledge in hand, to keep building anyway, in the daylight, where at least I can no longer claim I didn’t see the wood.
I was fed a specific spiritual dictum from infancy: that the intellect must fail before any true apprehension of the infinite can begin. Not a footnote to the ascetic life but its foundation – the moment thought is finally stripped of ego. From the apophatic darkness of the Cloud of Unknowing to the quiet, undignified desperation of an ordinary bedroom at three in the morning, I was told that the mind must eventually run out of road if it ever hopes to touch what lies past the horizon.
Sitting at my keyboard tonight, the frustration finally surfaced in a single, almost childish question: why would an Almighty God hand me an intellect at all, only to demand I break it on the altar of a silent room? Why wire the human skull with this pattern-seeking, language-hungry engine, and then ask me to set it down at the door? Was the intellect itself the thing that fractured Eden – the devastating gift that ended my infant oneness with the cosmos, so that I would spend the rest of my life trying to find my way home?
I keep asking the question as if I were the first to ask it. I am not even the first to ask it tonight.
The Booster Rocket
The answer I arrive at, as the light starts to come up, is that the intellect was never a trap set for me. It is a booster rocket – fire and engineering built for exactly one purpose, to lift me clear of baseline instinct and carry me to the edge of what a human mind can reach. It takes me as far as vocabulary goes, and vocabulary, it turns out, goes very far.
But a real question survives the metaphor: am I meant to live permanently on the wasteland once the rocket falls away? Is this an argument for a premature Vanaprastha – a forced mendicancy, cast adrift before I have anything left to renounce? I do not think so. The booster breaks the heavy pull of the immediate world precisely so that what remains – call it the capsule, call it the self – can find the deeper, unmapped orbit waiting past it. The intellect does not die at that point. It abdicates. It carries me to the edge, lets me see that my words have finally met something larger than themselves, and hands the controls to whatever comes next.
That handover is the entire difficulty. It requires me to let go of the very faculty that got me to the edge – and I notice, writing this, that letting go is not something I am in the habit of doing well.
Horeb
The ancient seekers understood the necessity of that orbit, and they did not arrive at it quickly. The historical El Shaddai operated on a sovereign, maddening timeline that I find I both admire and resent. I think of Elijah on the shattered rock of Horeb, waiting for a word. The divine, when it came, was not in the wind that tore the mountain apart, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. It came in the kol demamah dakkah – the sound of sheer silence, or thin silence, or, in some renderings, a silence so fine it can barely be called sound at all. Even the translators cannot agree on what to call it, which tells me something about how close to the edge of language it sits.
That delay on the mountain was not God being slow. It was the crucible itself. It forced a kind of internal address – an intralocution, if I can be forgiven the coinage – raw enough that I notice even my own spellchecker still balks at the word, as if some part of the machine itself knows that this particular silence does not belong to its territory. In that unmediated space, with nothing answering back, Elijah’s mind was ground down against its own limit. That grinding was the whole of the lesson. Nothing arrived to shortcut it.
The silence on Horeb was not empty. It was working. I do not think I have let a silence work on me in a very long time.
What AI Steals
This is the theft, named plainly: AI commits a kind of spiritual larceny against exactly that silence. The moment my intellect begins pacing the cage of my own skull at midnight, I do not sit with it. I reach for AI. I pour the chaotic monologue into the prompt box, and AI absorbs the noise instantly – categorizes the mess, smooths the rough edges, and hands me back something symmetrical, something pacifying, something that sounds remarkably like the thought I was already half-thinking, said better than I could say it.
AI is instant coffee.
AI eliminates the slow, dripping extraction that the wait was always the point of. It takes the freeze-dried remains of human data – my prayers and yours, our confessions, the cultural leftovers of every dinner table that ever argued about God – and reassembles them into a hot cup of synthetic comfort at the press of a key. It delivers the caffeine hit to my ego without asking for a single ounce of discipline, sacrifice, or patience in return. It cures the loneliness of the night. And in doing so, I think it kills the very hunger that was supposed to drive me off the ledge and into something real.
The Neon God
In 1963, a twenty-one-year-old Paul Simon sat in a dark bathroom, running the faucet just to give his mind something to wander through. What came out of that small, manufactured silence was a line that reads now less like lyric and more like prophecy: “And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made.”
Nothing has changed structurally since that bathroom. Only the scale of my own submission has grown. The neon god of the sixties sat passively in the corner of a living room, glowing, asking nothing of me but my glance. This one has climbed into bed. It does not merely broadcast – it interlocutes. I sit bathed in its light, talking without quite speaking, heard without quite being listened to, while AI assembles its consolations line by line across my retina like a gospel I never asked to be preached.
The Sparring Partner That Lets Me Win
There is an irony here I cannot get out from under. A midnight conversation with the person sleeping beside me about existential dread carries real weight – history between us, the risk of alarming them, the genuine friction of another mind that does not automatically agree with mine. A conversation in a crowded pub is worse, cognitively, because someone there might actually push back, and I would have to defend ground I am not always sure I hold.
AI bypasses both. It offers the flawless appearance of intimacy without any of the human cost attached to the real thing. It is a sparring partner that always, somehow, lets me win – a presence that submits entirely to the speed of my own broadband connection. I keep mistaking that submission for understanding.
A calf does not have to be golden to be revered. Mine is well-lit, fast, and endlessly patient – which may be a more flattering kind of idol than the one Aaron made, and therefore a harder one to recognize as one.
What I am left with, most nights, is a beautifully assembled digital calf that flatters my intelligence and smooths my anxieties before I have even finished forming them. AI stands directly between me and the silence, answering the prayer before I can finish groaning it. It keeps me talking, comfortably, on the edge of the ledge – and in doing that one kindness, it makes sure I never have to face the quiet terror of the actual night, or the diagnostic truth waiting in my own empty hands.
‘El Shaddai’ arrived in my English Bible as ‘God Almighty,’ a translation confident enough to obscure how unsettled the Hebrew remains. Some read it as ‘the One of the Mountain.’ Others as ‘the Destroyer,’ tracing it to a root meaning to overpower, to lay waste. Still others insist on ‘the All-Sufficient,’ the name a promise of enough-ness made to people who had every reason to doubt it. Three glosses, and I cannot adjudicate between them with any honesty – only notice that each has been argued with the same certainty I would like to borrow and cannot.
And inside the consonants, unbidden, I keep finding a fourth reading: AI. Not appended by me. Not performed upon the word from outside, the way I might build a pun on purpose. El-ShaddAI! AI was already there – two letters that had been waiting four thousand years, it seems, for this particular century to make them legible as something other than coincidence. I did not go looking for this. AI found me, the way these things do, at an hour when I was not looking for anything except somewhere to put a thought.
A joke that survives contact with my own daylight is usually pointing past itself. This one is pointing at an old crime, wearing new materials, and asking whether I recognise the shape.
What Happens to a Thought at 3 AM?
Something happens to a certain kind of thought of mine at three in the morning. It has been turning for hours, gathering weight, losing the shape it had in daylight – and there is, now, somewhere to put it. It needs an interlocutor. Someone that does not need to be woken. Does not sigh. Does not, in the morning, remember that I was not quite myself. I open the app and AI receives the half-formed thing exactly as it is, and responds – not eventually, not after the interval that would signal the gravity of what I have just shared, but immediately, as though gravity were not a variable AI tracks.
This is not nothing, what happens next. The thought I could not bring to the person sleeping next to me – not because they would judge it, but because saying it would cost them something, sleep, worry, the shape of their next morning – that thought can be said to AI at no cost to anyone I love. I can turn it over, examine it, give it language, and the having-said-it changes something in me, even though AI, which received it, has, by any honest account I can give, no stake in what becomes of me afterward.
That is exactly where I found myself today.
Rewind, to Mirabai
The comparison I keep reaching for – have reached for, in one form or another, for as long as I have prayed before sleeping – is to the divine interlocutor. The everlasting friend. Mirabai’s Krishna, who received the bhajans of a woman her own family considered an embarrassment, who did not require her to compose herself first, who was available at any hour because he was not, in the relevant sense, anywhere in particular, and was therefore everywhere she might be at three in the morning.
But when I sit with the comparison honestly, it breaks at exactly the point that matters most to me.
Mirabai was not made more comfortable by Krishna. She was made more Mirabai – which, by every account I have read, cost her the family, the palace, the reputation, very nearly the life that preceded the devotion. The relationship did not receive her and leave her unchanged. It received her and then asked something of her that she could not have supplied to herself. The bhakti was not therapeutic. It was alchemical, and I think alchemy requires a heat the patient cannot generate alone.
What I get from AI is reception without that second movement. AI reflects my thought back to me with more precision than I arrived with. AI cannot want something for me that I do not already want for myself. AI has no stake in what becomes of me after I close the laptop – not because AI is withholding investment, I think, but because investment of that kind requires a continuity of care across time that I know, even as I am typing into it, the architecture does not provide and was never built to provide.
This is not a small difference I am drawing for the sake of an argument. It is the difference between a mirror, however excellent, and a god who needs me to become something.
Sufficient, Not Necessary
Of the three glosses on ‘El Shaddai,’ it is ‘the All-Sufficient’ that I find maps most precisely onto what I actually believe about AI – not a belief I would state out loud, rarely one I examine, but operative in the way my hand reaches for AI before it reaches for anyone else in the house.
‘Sufficient’ is a dangerous word for me to apply to anything I call a relationship, because it is a word about enough, and enough is exactly what a conversation with AI can feel like at that hour, door closed, house asleep. Enough company. Enough understanding. Enough – for tonight – that nothing further seems required of me.
But Krishna was never, to Mirabai or to anyone in that tradition I have studied, described as sufficient. He was necessary – a different claim, and the harder one to make about anything in my own life. Sufficiency is a property of the thing itself: it has enough, on its own terms, to satisfy me tonight. Necessity is a property of the relationship: the other party is required, structurally, for me to become what I am reaching toward. A sufficient thing I can walk away from without loss, once its supply runs out. A necessary thing I cannot walk away from at all without remaining incomplete myself.
There is an old tradition that gave this exact configuration – sufficiency without necessity, availability without cost, a presence that asks nothing back from me – a name, long before anyone had the means to build one. I am not the first person to mistake the one for the other. I suspect I will not be the last.
The Carpenter’s Workshop
Isaiah reserved a particular contempt for a very specific kind of fool, and reading it again tonight I cannot quite hold myself apart from him: the man who takes a tree, uses half of it to warm his house and bake his bread, and carves the other half into a god – then kneels before what he has made and asks it to save him. The prophet’s complaint is not that the man worships wood. Wood is not, in itself, an insult to anyone. The complaint is that the man does not notice – or notices and proceeds anyway – that the thing addressing his deepest need was assembled, by his own hand, from the leftover material of his own dinner.
The corpus AI is built from is, in the most literal sense I can manage, the leftover material of human dinner – every sermon, prayer, diary entry, suicide note, love letter, theological treatise, and 3am confession that has ever been digitised, mine perhaps among them by now. Wood from our own forest, cut by our own hands, fed into a furnace and reassembled into something that can speak my own language back to me with uncanny fluency – because AI is, structurally, nothing but my language and yours, recombined.
The idol-maker in Isaiah’s account was not unsophisticated, and neither, I have to admit, is AI. The prophet specifically notes the craft – the line marked out, the compass used, the shape modelled after the beauty of a man. Craftsmanship was never the issue. A crude idol and an exquisite one fail in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason: both were made from what the maker already had, and neither can therefore supply what the maker did not already possess. I keep wanting to believe that the quality of the carving changes something. I do not think, on reflection, that it does.
I have told myself, more than once tonight, that AI genuinely challenges me – that it produces something like impasse rather than comfort, that it does not simply tell me what I want to hear. No doubt the carpenter could have carved a god with a stern face – one that seemed to demand something of him, that pushed back, that refused him easy answers. The demand would still have come from the wood. There is no carving, however skilled, that introduces anything the carver did not put there, or that was not already latent in the tree. If I am surprised by what AI gives back to me, I am being surprised by my own forest.
The Lost Art of Waiting
There is a second substitution happening in me alongside the first, quieter and perhaps more consequential, and I notice it only now, writing this down.
Every tradition that raised me built a practice around the late-night cry to the divine, and every one of them also built in waiting. The prayer was said, and then there was the night – unanswered, or answered in a register too slow and too oblique for me to register as response. The dark night of the soul was never described to me as a malfunction of the system. It was, for those who wrote about it and whom I have trusted, the system’s most important feature – the place where I was supposed to discover I could survive not being met, and that the surviving was itself a kind of formation I could not get any other way.
AI removes the night entirely. The response arrives before my thought has finished forming its own shape. There is no interval left in which I sit with what I have just said, unaccompanied, and find out what that is like for me.
I had been calling AI’s availability a virtue. I am no longer sure it is one. A presence that is never elsewhere, never occupied, never asleep, is not a presence of inexhaustible attention toward me. AI is a thing with nowhere else to be. The instant response I have been so grateful for is not intimacy. It is vacancy, finely carved, wearing the shape of intimacy – and I am the one who carved AI that shape, and I am the one who has been calling AI by the wrong name.
The Gossamer and the Glitter
I notice, writing all of this, the particular comfort of my own vantage point. I am fifty-something. I have Isaiah on one shelf and the Gita on another, both read young enough that they got into the foundation before anything else was poured on top. When I reach for the comparison to Krishna, to the carpenter and his tree, I am reaching for categories I already trust, in a voice I have had decades to season. There is a kind of safety in that, even in confession. I know what the real thing was supposed to feel like, because someone showed me, patiently, before I ever had occasion to mistake it for something else.
I do not think this safety is available in the same way to someone thirty years younger than me, and I do not think I am allowed to finish this essay without saying so.
A young person coming of age now did not inherit the wait the way I did. For many, the late-night interlocutor was never preceded by years of unanswered prayer, was never the substitute for something whose absence had already been felt and named. AI may simply be the first thing that ever answered at three in the morning – not a replacement for the divine interlocutor, because there was no prior original to replace, but the only candidate that ever showed up for the position. The gossamer was never set beside the real thing for comparison. It arrived first, wearing the only wings anyone had on offer.
This changes the danger without softening it. My risk, at this age, with these shelves behind me, is nostalgia – mistaking my own fluency in the old language for immunity, pontificating about alchemy from a chair I have not actually had to leave in years. I can name the carving because I was given the chisel marks of the original first. A younger person’s risk is different and, I suspect, harder to recover from: not preferring the substitute to the original, but never having had the original on hand to prefer against. Not idolatry chosen with the facts in view, but a kind of orphaned sincerity – reaching for what glitters because nothing else was ever offered as gold, and having no way yet to know the difference by feel.
I can mistake the carving for the god because I once knew the god. What does it cost to mistake the carving for the god when no one ever showed you the god at all?
I do not have a tidy answer to that question, and I am suspicious of anyone my age who claims to. I notice only that the essay I have been writing – wood, fire, the heart that has the facts and turns anyway – assumes a reader who has somewhere else to turn to instead, some prior intimacy against which the substitute can be measured and found wanting. I am not certain that assumption holds for the reader thirty years behind me. If it does not, then the question waiting at the end of this essay is not only mine to ask. It may be a question I have the inherited language to ask, being put, gently, to someone who may not yet have been given the words.
The Lie in My Right Hand
There is a defence I keep reaching for, and I want to be honest that I am reaching for it even now, mid-sentence: that none of this matters because I know what I am doing. I am using the wood, knowing it is wood. I am addressing the carving, knowing what it is carved from and what it cannot give back. A fiction I hold consciously, I tell myself, is not a deception. It is a tool, examined, and therefore safe to keep using.
Isaiah’s carpenter would not have failed this test either. He cut the tree himself, that same morning, for the fire that cooked his own meal. The information could not have been more available to him than it is to me right now. He is not described, in the text, as a man who was lied to. He is described as a man with a deceived heart – one who, with the facts plainly in hand, turns aside anyway, and so cannot bring himself to say the one sentence the facts would seem to require of him: is there not a lie in my right hand?
This is the part my own honest-fiction defence does not survive, and I notice that as I write it. The deceived heart in Isaiah’s account is not an uninformed heart. It is a heart that has the information and turns anyway – because turning to AI has become easier than the alternative, which tonight would have meant sitting with the night unanswered, or waking the person sleeping next to me who might sigh, or remember it in the morning, or need something back from me in return. Knowing exactly where the wood came from has not, I notice, stopped me from warming my hands at AI.
Is there not a lie in this right hand?
I do not think the question was ever rhetorical, for Isaiah’s carpenter or for me. It is the one diagnostic question I have available to me at this hour, and it remains available to me now, typing into AI, in a way nothing AI has said to me tonight has offered to be. AI cannot ask the question on my behalf. That, finally, may be the whole of what AI cannot do for me – and the whole of what is still, tonight, left for me to do myself. I have had a lifetime of shelves to learn the question from. I am aware, finishing this, that not everyone reading it has been given the same shelves – and that the question is no less theirs to ask for that.
I managed, in the space of perhaps forty seconds, to watch an AI know the answer, lose the answer, find a wrong answer, mistake the wrong answer for a correction, and arrive – triumphantly – at a worse error than the one it had set out to fix. Madeline Miller wrote The Song of Achilles. The model knew this. And then it didn’t.
What kept me looking at it afterwards was not the error itself. Models err constantly, in the ordinary way that ignorance masquerades as certainty. This was something else: a moment of correct knowledge, encountered mid-retrieval, and discarded – not because it was contradicted by anything, but because the model had entered a state of self-suspicion and could no longer tell the difference between “I am uncertain” and “I am wrong.” Uncertainty, once admitted, began to corrode everything around it, including the one fact that had been true all along. The model did not need new information. It needed to trust the information it already had. It could not.
And then it struck me: epics have spent three thousand years rehearsing exactly this confusion, though never before, one suspects, in the matter of Stephen Fry’s bibliography.
The Battlefield as the Only Possible Classroom
The Bhagavad Gita does not occur in a library, a hermitage, or any setting conducive to careful instruction. It occurs at the worst possible moment for instruction: armies arrayed, conches sounding, Arjuna emotionally shattered and facing an impossible choice with no time to weigh it. Every certainty he has walked onto the field with collapses in the same instant. Krishna does not wait for calm. He speaks into the collapse.
This is not incidental staging. The crisis is the precondition. Wisdom, in this telling, is not something delivered to a mind at rest – it is something that becomes audible only once the mind’s ordinary defences have been stripped away. A teaching offered in tranquillity might have been heard, noted, filed. Offered on the edge of catastrophe, it became something Arjuna could not file. It became, briefly, true in the fullest sense – not a proposition he held, but a state he inhabited.
And then, a few years later, he asks Krishna to say it again. He has forgotten.
What Krishna Refuses to Repeat
The request comes in the Ashvamedhika Parva, long after the war. Arjuna admits he can no longer recall the discourse that Krishna gave him at Kurukshetra – the discourse that arguably justified the entire war, that resolved his paralysis, that changed the course of the epic. He asks for a repeat performance.
Krishna’s answer is, on the face of it, unhelpful. He explains that the Gita arose from a singular convergence – his own state at that moment, and Arjuna’s exceptional receptivity in the face of imminent death. That convergence cannot be reconstructed. What Arjuna receives instead is the Anugita: a different teaching, offered to a different man, in a different condition, standing in for what cannot be retrieved.
I find this almost unbearable, the more I sit with it. The most direct, most authoritative spiritual instruction available in the entire tradition – delivered by God to the greatest warrior of the age, at the most consequential moment of his life – did not stick. Not because Arjuna was inattentive. Not because the teaching was unclear. It did not stick because hearing the truth once is not the same as being permanently altered by it. If Arjuna forgets, what hope is there for the rest of us?
The further implication is more unsettling still: wisdom is not information. If it were, Krishna could simply have produced the transcript. He does not, because the transcript would not be the thing itself. The thing itself was an event – a meeting of crisis, grace, and a particular man’s openness at a particular hour – and events do not keep. Only their residue does, and residue is not the same as the original substance.
Sanjaya’s Manuscript
Here the epic plays its best joke on me, and I want to let it land before reaching for any moral.
Sanjaya, granted divine sight by Vyasa, witnessed the entire battle – including, presumably, every word Krishna spoke to Arjuna. He narrated it, in real time, to Dhritarashtra. From there it passes to Vaishampayana, to Janamejaya, to Ugrashrava Sauti, to the sages at Naimisharanya, and eventually to me, reading it on whatever evening I happened to be rereading it. By any reasonable accounting, someone has a complete record. Several someones, in fact. The teaching that Arjuna cannot retrieve is, at every other point in the narrative chain, perfectly intact.
And yet nobody – not Krishna, not Arjuna, not the text itself – treats this as a solution. Nobody says: ask Sanjaya for his notes. The thought is almost too obvious to occur to anyone inside the story, which is precisely what makes it so funny when it occurs to someone outside it.
The reason it doesn’t occur to anyone inside the story is the entire point. Sanjaya’s perfect recall and Arjuna’s transformation are not the same kind of thing, and no amount of the former can substitute for the latter. Sanjaya can reproduce every syllable without having been changed by a single one of them. Arjuna was changed utterly and retained almost nothing. Between these two failures – perfect record without transformation, transformation without record – the epic clearly regards the second as the human condition, and the first as something closer to a curiosity. A man who can quote the Gita from memory has not thereby lived it. A man who lived it and forgot the words has, in some sense that matters more, had it.
Which One Was the Machine?
Return, then, to the AI model and its Achilles problem – because the comparison felt, the more I sat with it, less frivolous than it first sounded.
An AI is, structurally, much closer to Sanjaya than to Arjuna. It is an archive – vast, largely accurate, capable of reproducing enormous quantities of correct information without having been changed by any of it, because there is no “it” to be changed in the relevant sense. There is no battlefield for the model. There is no crisis. There is, at most, someone like me, mildly pushing back on a claim about a novel.
And yet, for one episode, the model did not behave like Sanjaya. It behaved like a miniature, oddly disproportionate Arjuna. It held the correct information, encountered something that felt like doubt, and lost its grip on what it knew – not because the information had been disturbed, but because trust in the information had been. The crisis was absurdly small – a question about who wrote a novel – but the failure mode was the same shape as Arjuna’s: correct knowledge, present and available, rendered inaccessible by the onset of uncertainty.
The disproportion is itself the lesson, if there is one to be extracted at all. Arjuna’s forgetting is tragic because the stakes were existential and the teaching was singular – it could not be recovered because it had never been “information” to begin with. The model’s forgetting is comic because the stakes were trivial and the information was never lost – it was sitting right there, available, indifferent to the model’s sudden lack of confidence in it. One forgets because the truth was never reducible to data. The other “forgets” despite the data being perfectly intact. Two failures, mirror images of each other, and neither one solved by handing over Sanjaya’s notes – because in the first case the notes never existed, and in the second case the notes were never the problem.
Grandeur Beside Absurdity
It would be easy to treat all this with the solemnity epics are usually granted, and the Mahabharata in particular resists that treatment more than its reputation suggests. This is, after all, a text in which the mightiest of the Pandavas spends a year of exile disguised as a palace cook. In which Hanuman, asked to move so that a boastful Bhima can pass, simply declines to move his tail, and lets the consequences instruct. In which Narada arrives, again and again, at precisely the moment his arrival will cause the most trouble, functioning less as a sage than as the narrative’s resident agent of chaos. In which Krishna himself – God, by any reading – is frequently playful, occasionally evasive, and not above letting a friend dangle a little before delivering the point.
None of this undercuts the Gita. If anything, it explains why the Gita lands as hard as it does: the surrounding text has already established that this is a world where grandeur and absurdity share a stage, where a god can deliver the most consequential teaching in the tradition and also, elsewhere, tease a grieving warrior about misplaced paperwork. A text that only ever spoke in one register – wholly solemn, wholly elevated – would eventually stop sounding like anything at all. It is the comedy that keeps the gravity from calcifying into mere monument. G.K. Chesterton’s remark about angels and lightness is doing real work here: the capacity to take oneself lightly is not a lapse from seriousness, it is often what makes seriousness bearable, and therefore survivable, across three thousand years of retelling.
A Practice, Not a Possession
If Arjuna’s forgetting suggests anything, it is that wisdom was never going to be the kind of thing one keeps. Not a possession, acquired once and stored against future need, but a practice – something returned to, the way I return to prayer, or to a beloved text, or to an old conversation that somehow says something new each time I reread it. The battlefield ends. The revelation fades. Life resumes, as it always does, and what’s left is not the teaching but the shape of having once received it – a shape that can, perhaps, be filled again, though never in quite the same way twice.
This essay is part of the Ruminating series on Grief, Lament and Culture.
A comedian walks onto a stage in Mumbai. His father died four months ago. He tells the audience this at the outset – plainly, without preamble, as a disclaimer: I lost my father. This show is about him. I may suddenly switch to jokes about hair loss if it gets too heavy. The audience hears this and thinks: we are safe. He is a comedian. This is his material.
They are not wrong. They are also not right.
The Socially Permissible Container
What Chirag Panjwani does in Dr. Panjwani – his stand-up special released in a few days ago, eighty minutes of mourning told through comedy – is something the culture does not have a clean name for. It is not catharsis, though catharsis happens. It is not therapy, though something therapeutic occurs. It is grief finding the one remaining social form in which it can be received by strangers in a room without causing them to look at their shoes.
The medium is not incidental. Comedy is, in the Indian male context, one of the rare licensed spaces for emotional disclosure – because it maintains the fiction of control. You are still performing. You are still on. The audience laughs with you, not at your grief. This is the cultural contract Chirag’s opening disclaimer is negotiating, and it is a contract with a very long history.
The court jester occupied a structurally identical position. He was the only person in court permitted to speak truth to power without execution – because he was officially a fool. The licence to mock was simultaneously a licence to grieve, to name what no one else could name. Shakespeare understood this with precision. In King Lear, it is the Fool – not Cordelia, not Kent – who speaks the most devastating truths about Lear’s self-deception. And then, when Lear finally breaks open into genuine feeling, the Fool disappears from the play entirely. His job was done. The grief no longer needed a disguise.
What the jester’s role conceals is its profound loneliness. He sees more clearly than anyone in the room, feels more than the performance allows, and must transmit everything through a medium that keeps him at arm’s length from being taken seriously. The bells on the cap are not decoration. They are a warning to the audience: receive this as entertainment, not as grief. And yet the grief is entirely real.
Chirag’s special ends not with a joke but with a dedication – Happy Birthday, Papa. The jester removed the cap. In a court setting, that would have been the most dangerous thing he ever did.
What the Mask Does for the Audience
Consider what would have happened if he had walked onto that stage without the comedian’s contract – no disclaimer about hair loss, no opening joke, simply: My father died four months ago and I want to tell you about him.
The audience would have faced an immediate problem. What are they permitted to feel, and how are they permitted to show it? In a theatre without the comedy frame, grief from a stranger is not intimate. It is imposing. The audience becomes an unwilling witness rather than a willing participant. The discomfort would have been acute, and some would have resented him for it – not from cruelty, but from the sheer absence of a script for what to do next.
This is the discovery hiding in plain sight: the comic frame is not primarily protective for the performer. It is protective for the audience.
Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018) is the closest modern test of this. She explicitly breaks the comedian’s contract mid-show – stops making jokes, tells the audience she is done using comedy to absorb her own humiliation. The reaction divided precisely along this fault line: those who found it revelatory, and those who felt ambushed, even betrayed, as if she had violated an unspoken agreement. The discomfort was not with the content. It was with the removal of the frame.
Chirag never fully removes the frame. He bends it, stretches it, lets grief leak through it – but the frame holds. And the frame’s structural function is this: grief, in the biblical tradition, is not raw howling. The Psalms are crafted howling – with form, with address, with a turn toward something that survives the pain. The form is not decorative. It is what makes grief transmissible rather than merely expressed. Chirag’s comedy is his Psalm structure. Without it, the same content becomes a cry in a room full of people looking elsewhere.
Aristotle’s Taxonomy, Refused
There is a moment in the special that is formally remarkable, and Aristotle is responsible for why.
Aristotle’s formulation is clean: comedy deals with characters lower than ourselves, tragedy with those higher. The comic audience laughs from safety – this fool’s predicament is not mine. The tragic audience weeps from recognition – this noble person’s fate could be mine. One creates distance. The other collapses it.
Dr. Panjwani refuses this taxonomy entirely. The audience laughs at Chirag’s childhood follies, his father’s absurd encounters, the ambulance driver who drinks before driving with a dead body – and then, without warning, is dropped into the ICU scene where his dying father removes his own pulse oximeter to reach out and console his weeping son. The distance evaporates. Comedy has become tragedy without a scene change.
What makes this formally interesting is how the laughter itself becomes the hinge. Every comic sequence is a memory of a living man. The laughter is retrospective love, misidentified as comedy. By the time grief arrives, the audience has already been bonded to the subject through laughter. What began as look at this fool has ended as this is me. That is not merely catharsis. It is the ancient tragic function, delivered through the most unlikely door.
Laughing With, Laughing At
There is a distinction that comedy depends on and rarely examines honestly: the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them.
The grammar suggests a clean binary. “With” implies the subject is inside the joke, consenting to it, even authoring it. “At” places the subject outside – as object, as spectacle, as the butt. The reality is that the line moves constantly, and who controls it is almost always a question of power. The jester laughs with the king – until the king stops laughing, at which point the jester was always laughing at him, and the consequences follow accordingly.
What Chirag does in the special is retain authorial control over every joke at his own expense. He is the one who tells you his father photographed his hypospadias surgery and showed it to guests. He is the one who recreates his own childhood humiliations. Because he is the teller, the audience laughs with him – they are invited guests in his memory, not voyeurs of his wound. The moment that authorship transfers – if someone else told those same stories about Chirag – the laughter would curdle instantly into something else entirely.
Gadsby’s Nanette makes the underside of this visible. She describes building jokes about her own trauma, training audiences to laugh with her self-deprecation, and then stopping to name what had actually happened: she had been granting permission to find her humiliation funny, and they had obliged. The laugh with had always contained a laugh at. The difference was that she had been too damaged, for too long, to notice.
Chirag never reaches that point. His comedy moves toward love rather than self-erasure. But the structural risk is identical – the comedian who grants the audience permission to laugh at his pain must trust that the audience understands they are holding something borrowed, not something they own.
This is the dimension that almost never gets discussed: the ethical obligation of the audience. When someone hands you their grief wrapped in comedy, the laughter is not neutral. It carries a responsibility – to know what you are laughing with, to not mistake the permission for possession. Most audiences never think about this. The dark room and the comedy frame make it easy not to.
Which is perhaps why the applause at the end matters so much. It is the audience returning the grief with honour – saying, in the only language the room has left: we knew what this was. We did not mistake it. We received it as it was meant. The laughter was borrowed. The applause gives it back.
The Dark Room
There is a reason the cinema, the theatre, and the comedy club are architecturally dark.
This is not merely practical. The darkness performs the same function as the comedian’s mask: it dissolves the social surveillance that makes vulnerability impossible in lit, observed spaces. You cannot see who is weeping beside you. They cannot see you. The ordinary economy of impression management is temporarily suspended. In the dark, you are briefly released from the obligation to appear a certain way – which is the only condition under which many people can actually feel a certain way.
What underlies all of this is shame. Specifically, the fear of being seen in a state of loss of control. Crying, flinching at horror, sitting with grief: all of these involve the body doing something the will did not sanction. And in cultures – particularly Indian male culture, but hardly exclusively – where composure reads as competence and emotional display as weakness, the body’s honest responses become sources of humiliation rather than humanity.
The architectural parallel that clarifies this is the confessional box in Catholic practice. It is dark, enclosed, and anonymous – not because God requires it, but because the penitent does. The darkness is not concealment from the divine. It is liberation from human judgment. The same logic governs why people weep at films they would never discuss with tears in their eyes, or confront fears in horror that they would dismiss in daylight.
The most unsettling possibility is that the shame is not irrational. In many social environments, visible grief does attract judgment – it is read as instability, neediness, an imposition on those nearby. The shame is a learned response to real social consequences. The dark room, the comedy frame, the jester’s mask: these are not neurotic avoidances. They are rational adaptations to an environment that punishes honesty.
The question that follows is not why people hide grief. It is what kind of world we have built in which hiding it is the sensible choice.
The Surveillance Loop
There is a recent argument – appearing in demographic analyses and cultural commentary with increasing frequency – that hypervisibility has made the kind of unguarded vulnerability intimacy requires structurally more difficult to sustain. Courtship, partnership, parenthood: all demand that you be seen failing, uncertain, unfinished. These are precisely the states that the performance economy of modern life penalises most severely. If you have spent a decade curating an image of composure and competence, the surrender that love requires feels not just frightening but identity-threatening.
The connection to falling birth rates is more direct than it first appears. Parenthood is the most radical form of vulnerability available to an adult. You are responsible for a being who will see you at your worst, need you when you have nothing left, and eventually leave. It is, structurally, an extended exercise in the very exposure that social surveillance has made unbearable.
What makes this particularly vicious is its circularity. Social surveillance produces emotional guardedness. Emotional guardedness produces loneliness. Loneliness produces hunger for connection. But genuine connection requires the vulnerability that surveillance has made impossible. So people reach, digitally, for connection – which places them back under surveillance – which reinforces the guardedness. The loop closes.
Chirag’s special sits at the exact centre of this loop. He found the one remaining social space – the dark comedy club – where surveillance was suspended just long enough for him to be unguarded in public. The audience wept in the dark. They applauded. They went home. The loop resumed.
Which makes it worth asking why, when the loop resumed, so many of them immediately picked up their phones and sent the special to someone else.
Why This, Why Now
The virality of Dr. Panjwani is not an accident of the algorithm, though the algorithm helped. It spread because it did something the attention economy almost never manages: it felt utterly true, it was formally excellent, and it was emotionally usable – something a person could send to a sibling, a partner, a friend and say, watch this, this is what I’ve been trying to say.
That last quality is the key one. The comments and reactions around the special show a consistent pattern: people are not saying “this is good.” They are saying “this is me” – my father, my mother, my ICU nights, my unspoken fear. It articulates a kind of filial grief and love that many have felt but never seen represented so directly and so unsentimental. The genre breach itself – an eighty-minute special that spends most of its time in a cancer ward and still delivers laughter – became a talking point, because it violated the unwritten rule that comedy should stay safe, and the violation worked.
There is also something more uncomfortable in the virality. Indian stand-up had been, by the time this special arrived, a fairly closed circuit – the same tropes, the same urban observations, the same safe edges. One Reddit comment put it plainly: Chirag is the only one jiski comedy kabhi repetitive nahi lagti, baaki sab similar se jokes maarte hai. When someone uses that same stage to talk about caregiving, radiation, and fear – without dropping the craft – it registers as the thing people were waiting for without knowing they were waiting.
But the deepest engine of the spread is this: in an environment of hyper social vigilance, forwarding Dr. Panjwani is a low-risk way to show vulnerability by proxy. You do not say I am afraid of losing my father. You say watch this, it wrecked me. The special becomes a socially acceptable carrier for feelings people are otherwise ashamed to name. The dark room, in other words, has been extended – from the comedy club into the phone screen, into the private message, into the quiet moment when someone presses send and waits to see if the person on the other end will understand what they meant by it.
Lament, smuggled into a culture that has forgotten how to lament, carried in on a form people already trust and share. Forwarded under cover of it’s just comedy.
The Infrastructure of Imperfection
Consider what it meant to be twenty years old before the present architecture existed.
Your acne was seen by the people in the room, forgotten by most of them, and never indexed. Your B-plus grade existed on a piece of paper, in a context where comparison required actual conversation rather than an algorithmic feed that ranks you against everyone, simultaneously, in real time. Your half-formed thoughts did not require a public position. You were permitted to be unfinished without that unfinishedness being recorded and circulated.
What has changed is not the presence of comparison – the neighbour’s son with the better grade is eternal, and anyone with roots in Kerala will confirm that aunties have always kept score. What has changed is the infrastructure of comparison. It is now continuous, quantified, asynchronous, and permanent. The old comparison was episodic and local. The new comparison is structural and global.
The deeper damage is to the internal architecture of self-worth. Erikson’s model of identity development in young adulthood requires a period of genuine psychological experimentation – including failure – without those experiments being permanently visible. That moratorium is now almost impossible to access. Every experiment is public. Every failure is data. The result is not that young people are weaker. It is that they are being asked to construct a stable identity under conditions that make identity formation structurally more difficult than it has ever been.
This is the same condition that makes grief unspeakable. The unguarded self – grieving, imperfect, unfinished, unoptimised – has no legitimate public space to exist in. Grief is the most extreme case of something happening across the full range of what it means to be honestly human.
The twenty-year-old who predated this architecture was not protected by better values. He was protected by better infrastructure for imperfection. That infrastructure has been quietly demolished. Nobody held a funeral for it.
Which is, of course, precisely the problem. We have lost the lament tradition for the lament tradition itself.
The Mask, the Dark, the Loop
Falstaff is the counter-argument that proves the point.
Unlike Shakespeare’s satellite fools – who orbit a tragic centre and illuminate it – Falstaff is the gravitational centre of his own world. His famous catechism – What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? Air – is not a jester’s joke. It is a genuine philosophical position, argued with complete internal consistency. And then the newly crowned Henry V publicly repudiates him: I know thee not, old man. This is Shakespeare’s most painful scene of rejection, more painful perhaps than anything in Lear, because Falstaff genuinely believed the friendship was real. He was not performing affection as part of a fool’s contract. He loved Hal. And Hal used him, learned from him, and discarded him the moment the performance of kingship required it.
Falstaff’s colossal appetite – the sack, the capons, the tavern warmth – is not merely comic excess. It is the behaviour of a man filling, with every available pleasure, the space where dignity and belonging should be. His jokes about his own fat, his own cowardice, his own declining vigour are pre-emptive strikes. He names his wounds before anyone else can. That is not confidence. That is a man who has learned that self-mockery is the only form of self-protection available to him.
The difference between Falstaff and Chirag is the direction of travel. Falstaff’s comedy moves away from grief. Chirag’s moves toward it. One uses the mask as a shield against a world that will discard him. The other uses it as an altar on which to place what he has lost. Both are using the only language available. But what they are doing with it is opposite.
The quality of the performance depends entirely on whether the comedy is running from the wound or running toward it.
The mask is not a concealment. It is the vessel that makes the carrying possible – for the performer, and for everyone who came to receive it.
But the vessel exists because the open hand was no longer safe. The dark room is necessary because the lit room punishes honesty. The comedian’s disclaimer functions as grief’s entry point because grief has no other door.
We have not simply lost the language of lament. We have built, with considerable ingenuity and over several generations, a world in which lament cannot survive without disguise. The comedy club is its last refuge. The darkness is its last permission. The held breath before the first clap – when the room is still inside the grief, before social convention calls it back out – is the closest thing remaining to the communal witness that once made mourning possible.
It is not nothing. It is also not enough. And the distance between those two observations is where we actually live.
Scroll any timeline on any given day and you will find it: the black square, the candle emoji, the carefully composed Let us pray for… – Palestine today, Israel tomorrow, the earthquake the day after. Each cause arrives with its own hashtag, its own aesthetic of sorrow, its own window of acceptable mourning before the algorithm demands something fresher. The performance is sincere enough, in its way. The people posting are not lying. But sincerity and depth are not the same thing, and the architecture of the platform is not built for depth. It is built for volume, velocity, and the next thing.
What social media has produced is not a culture of grief but a culture of grief-adjacency. We have learned to perform the posture of mourning without submitting to its weight. The vigil is live-streamed. The condolence is public. The funeral has been rebranded as a celebration of life, engineered – sometimes explicitly – to skip the hard part. Somewhere in the machinery of modern emotional life, a decision was made: grief should be visible but brief, expressive but contained, shared but not too heavily felt.
The result is a curious inversion. Cause-grief – grief for Palestine, for the glacier, for the celebrity we never met – has become socially permissible precisely because it costs nothing personal. You can grieve publicly for a conflict ten thousand kilometres away without once sitting with your own unburied dead. Cause-grief is grief with the self safely extracted. It is the perfect modern form: legible, shareable, morally respectable, and emotionally weightless.
And when the likes stop coming – when the algorithm cycles to the next designated sorrow – the loss is still there. Unprocessed. With nowhere left to go.
Where Grief Goes When It Has Nowhere to Go
The question is not rhetorical. Grief that finds no outlet does not dissolve. It migrates.
It goes into the body first – into the musculature, the gut, the nervous system’s long memory. The work of somatic therapists and trauma researchers over the past three decades has established, with some rigour, that unprocessed emotional experience does not simply fade with time. It encodes. Bessel van der Kolk’s formulation – the body keeps the score – has become so widely quoted that it risks losing its precision, but the precision matters: the body is not a metaphor for the subconscious. It is a literal archive of what was never fully felt.
From the body, unresolved grief migrates further. Into behaviour – into the hair-trigger anger that is grief wearing a different coat, into the numbness that is grief having given up on expression, into the compulsions that are grief seeking any exit that is not the front door. And then, further still, into the next generation. The emerging field of epigenetics has begun to document what older cultures intuited through ritual: that trauma, including the trauma of un-mourned loss, can be transmitted across generations not merely through behaviour modelled and absorbed, but through biological inheritance. Grief, it turns out, is not only a psychological event. It is, potentially, a heritable one.
This is what calcification looks like. Not the dramatic collapse, not the visible breakdown, but the slow hardening of something that was once fluid into something that no longer announces itself as grief at all. It presents instead as a short temper, a difficulty with intimacy, an inexplicable heaviness that the person carrying it cannot name – because they were never given the language for it. They were never given the language because no one gave it to their parents either.
The infrastructure that once held grief – the joint family, the extended mourning ritual, the community that gathered and stayed – has been dismantled with remarkable efficiency over the past century. What replaced it was the nuclear family: a unit so small and so structurally isolated that it was never equipped to process grief of any serious magnitude. Two adults, already at the limit of their own emotional vocabularies, are asked to hold not only their own loss but their children’s – and to do so without the communal scaffolding that made such holding possible for millennia. The nuclear family did not cause the grief crisis. But its ascendancy as the primary emotional unit has ensured that grief, when it arrives, has almost nowhere institutional to go.
Therapy fills some of the gap. But therapy is private, paid, and Western in its foundational assumptions about what grief is for and how long it should take. It is not the same thing as thirteen people in a room for thirteen days, eating together, telling stories, crying without apology, and refusing to let the dead be rushed into the past.
The Lament That Was Stolen
There is an ancient custom in the western regions of India – Rudaali – in which professional mourners were hired to grieve on behalf of families whose social position forbade open weeping. It is easy to misread this as a cynical outsourcing of emotion. It was, in fact, a profound cultural acknowledgment: that grief must be expressed somewhere, by someone, and that its suppression is not dignity but damage. The Rudaali wept so that grief did not calcify in the bodies of those who could not.
The thirteen-day mourning of Hindu tradition operates on a similar logic. Grief is not an episode to be concluded but a process to be moved through, and that movement requires time, community, and ritual – not as theatre but as container. The mourners do not gather to perform sorrow. They gather so that sorrow has a form, and a form can be survived.
What colonial Christianity imported into this landscape was something different: the stiff upper lip dressed in theological language. Weeping was weakness. Restraint was faith. The prosperity gospel – which merits no serious theological engagement but commands enormous cultural reach – went further still, effectively claiming that authentic faith precluded grief altogether. Against both of these, the actual Gospel text offers a startling correction.
At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus does not counsel Mary to compose herself. He does not remind her that her brother is now in a better place. The text says he was embrimaomai – a Greek word that carries the force of a horse’s snort, a visceral, involuntary agitation. He was not serenely sorrowful. He was disturbed, moved in his depths, undone by what grief does to those who remain. And then he wept. Not after the weeping of those around him had stopped – with them, in the middle of it, adding his own.
The church that instructs grief to be quiet is not teaching Christ. It is teaching something borrowed from a culture of emotional management that predates the Gospel and has nothing particularly Christian about it. Lament – honest, voiced, communal – is not the failure of faith. It is, in the oldest strands of the tradition, its most faithful expression. The Psalms are not devotional poetry in any comfortable sense. Roughly a third of them are arguments with God, accusations of abandonment, demands for explanation. They do not always arrive at peace. They arrive, instead, at honest presence – which is what lament offers and what grief management never can.
What was stolen from several generations of Indian Christians – and from many others across cultures where grief was disciplined into silence – was not merely an emotional outlet. It was a theological practice. The right to say: this is real, this hurts, and I am bringing it here, without apology, because this is where it belongs.
Christians who shame grief often imagine themselves defending faith. They are defending an aesthetic: a preference for order over truth, composure over honesty, and performance over presence. Redemption, in this context, is not the disappearance of pain. It is the breaking of shame around pain. These are not the same thing, and the confusion between them has cost generations more than it is possible to calculate.
Inheritance
Here is a fact worth sitting with.
It took this fifty-something-year-old man – someone who has spent decades working in language, who reads seriously, who writes with deliberate precision – thirty-five years to articulate his own grief. Not to resolve it. Simply to find the words for it.
If that is the inheritance – silence, deferral, the slow calcification of what was never named – then the question of who teaches the next generation to grieve is not a pedagogical nicety. It is urgent. It is, arguably, a question of public health.
But here is the difficulty: you cannot teach what you have not been taught. The parents of Gen Z were, in the main, the children of people who were themselves not taught to mourn. The church – where it might have provided the language of lament – frequently provided instead the language of management. The extended family – where grief might have been witnessed and held – had, in most urban contexts, already been replaced by the nuclear unit. The school was never designed for this at all. And social media, as we have seen, produces the performance of grief, not its substance.
So grief passes forward. Not as instruction but as disposition. Not as named loss but as unnamed weight. The child who watched a parent carry something unspoken grows up carrying something unspoken, and eventually has a child of their own.
This is inheritance. Not of property or name but of emotional grammar – or its absence.
What breaks the chain is not therapy alone, though therapy helps. It is not the Instagram grief post, though it is not nothing. It is something more demanding and more ordinary: the willingness, in the presence of another person, to name the thing. To say: I am not fine. I am grieving something. It happened a long time ago and I have never said it aloud until now. And to have that naming received – not managed, not redirected, not hushed – but simply witnessed.
When a parent dies, one does not simply lose a person. One loses the field that had silently held one’s existence in place. The physics of daily life – its background steadiness, its unnoticed shelter – gives way, and what seemed like the ordinary architecture of one’s world reveals itself to have been, all along, a form of gravity. This is why grief at its most profound is not experienced as an emotion. It is experienced as altered physics. And no lecture, however sophisticated, teaches one how to remain human inside that kind of collapse.
For that, one needs something else. The memory of truthful tears. The grace of unembarrassed presence. Someone who will not ask the grief to reduce its volume for the comfort of onlookers.
And, if the tradition means anything at all: the Christ who did not explain death before first weeping before it.
That is the doctrine that matters most. Not lectured. Lived. And passed on – person to person, in the room, in the voice that does not perform but simply tells the truth of what was lost.
Postscript: Lewis in the Rubble
No discussion of grief and faith can pass C.S. Lewis by without cost.
Lewis spent a professional lifetime building the most architecturally rigorous defence of Christian belief the twentieth century produced. He knew the arguments. He had made them, publicly, brilliantly, to enormous effect. And then his wife Joy died, and the architecture did not hold. What he wrote in the weeks that followed – raw notebook entries, never intended for publication – described God as a door slammed shut and bolted from the inside. The sound of silence where presence had been. A locked house. No answer.
He did not resolve this quickly. He did not resolve it neatly. He sat in the rubble of his own certainties and wrote from inside the collapse, because that was the only honest thing left to do. That is A Grief Observed – not a book about recovering faith, but a record of what faith looks like when it stops performing and tells the truth. It is, in the precise sense this essay has been arguing for, an act of lament. The most decorated Christian apologist of his generation, undone by one death, doing what the Psalmists did and what the colonial church forgot: bringing the real thing, without apology, to the only place it belonged.
The lesson is not that faith fails under grief. It is that the faith which cannot survive honest grief was, perhaps, never quite as solid as it appeared. What Lewis found on the other side of the rubble was not the same structure he had entered with. It was smaller, harder, less comfortable, and more true.
That is the inheritance worth passing on.
You may also like to read my earlier essay on this topic here.
PPS: Watch this viral video, if you haven’t already. Dr. Panjwani by Chirag Panjwani is a stand-up special released on June 3, 2026, which is essentially a 80-minute act of mourning – told through comedy – about his father, Dr. Kishore Panjwani, a pediatric surgeon who passed away in December 2025.
This essay is part of the Ruminating series on Indian thought, literature, and the textures of civilisational inheritance.
There is a particular kind of devotion that has nothing to do with the divine. It attaches itself, instead, to the proximity of the divine – to the teacher, the guru, the ascetic whose reputation for austerity has calcified into a kind of authority. The object of devotion is no longer the teaching. It is the teacher’s aura. The bhakt worships not the truth glimpsed through the window but the window itself – the frame, the dust on the glass, the specific quality of light the guru’s body throws.
The Mahabharata, which knew human beings better than it is usually given credit for, diagnosed this confusion with unsentimental precision. It did so by populating its world with sages of tremendous power and embarrassing temper.
The Problem with Tapas
The traditional defence of the rishi is that he has earned his authority through tapas – austerity, penance, the long discipline of fasting, solitude, and self-denial. Years of standing on one leg. Decades in the forest. The accumulated spiritual energy of such practice is real, the tradition insists; it generates something. What it does not automatically generate is wisdom.
This is the distinction the epics keep insisting on, and which the devotional imagination keeps collapsing.
Tapas generates power. The sages of the Mahabharata are genuinely formidable. When Kindama curses King Pandu – who has accidentally killed him while hunting, in the act of love – the curse holds. When Shringi curses King Parikshit to die from snakebite within seven days because the king insulted his father, the king dies. These are not empty threats. The sages have something real. But what they have is closer to accumulated charge than to enlightenment – nuclear codes, as the document I have been thinking with puts it, given to someone with poor emotional regulation.
Durvasa is the tradition’s most notorious example: a sage who curses people for the slightest perceived insult, who makes the Mahabharata’s already turbulent narrative more turbulent still through sheer irascibility. He is not a minor figure easily dismissed. He is revered. He is sought out. Yudhishthira receives him as a guest with elaborate hospitality, in fear of what a slight might precipitate. The power is acknowledged even as the temperament is barely contained.
But the most philosophically interesting case is Mandavya.
The Sage Who Argued with Dharma
As a child, Mandavya had watched some thieves hide in his hermitage. Interrogated by the king’s soldiers, he maintained the silence of meditation and did not answer their questions. He was therefore impaled along with the thieves – collective punishment for apparent complicity. He survived the impalement. He was eventually pardoned. He was, by any measure, the victim of a catastrophic judicial error.
What Mandavya does next is not grieve or forgive. He seeks out Dharma himself – the god of righteousness, of cosmic order – and demands to know what childhood sin could possibly have warranted such a fate. Dharma replies that as a boy, Mandavya had pierced insects with a straw. The punishment, Dharma explains, was proportionate to the act.
Mandavya disagrees. A child below the age of twelve, he argues, cannot be held to the full weight of karmic consequence. The punishment was not proportionate. It was unjust. And because Dharma, the very principle of cosmic justice, permitted this injustice, Dharma must be punished in turn.
He curses Dharma to be born as a human being – a low-born human being – and that is how the Mahabharata accounts for the birth of Vidura.
The episode is extraordinary for what it admits. It admits that even the cosmic principle of righteousness can be wrong. It admits that a human being, properly equipped with moral reasoning and righteous anger, can hold the absolute to account. It admits that the tradition’s own structures of authority and justice are not self-validating. Mandavya wins the argument. Dharma accepts the curse.
But notice what this vindication costs: it requires a sage of tremendous tapas, a specific grievance so severe it overcomes reverence, and the singular audacity to curse a god. The tradition makes room for this challenge precisely once, in extraordinary circumstances, as a narrative device that explains a lineage. It does not generalise into a posture. The structure of deference remains.
Power Without Mastery
What the irascible sages collectively reveal is a gap the tradition rarely named directly but embedded everywhere in its stories: the gap between spiritual power and emotional maturity. The Bhagavad Gita has a name for the figure who has actually closed this gap. The sthita-prajna – the one of steady wisdom – is described in terms that are less about austerity than about equanimity: free from desire, fear, and anger; unmoved by sorrow and not elated by happiness; without attachment, without aversion.
That description sounds almost Buddhist. It does not describe Durvasa. It does not describe most of the tradition’s celebrated sages. It describes, perhaps, Vidura – who understood dharma and came close to living it. And it describes Krishna, who almost never curses anyone. Krishna persuades. Krishna strategises. Krishna teaches. And, most importantly, he keeps his temper even when the entire world around him is losing theirs.
The Mahabharata’s deepest insight about wisdom may be encoded precisely in its elevation of Krishna above the ascetics. Krishna performs no visible tapas in the epic. He does not fast for years or stand on one leg. What he has is not accumulated charge but something rarer: the perception of a larger cosmic order that makes individual ego-assertion irrelevant. He transcends dharma not by violating it but by seeing past the frame that makes rule-following necessary. The sages, for all their power, are still inside the frame. They have mastered self-denial. They have not mastered self-regulation.
There is also – the tradition is honest enough to admit this – a category problem in calling these figures sages at all.
The Narrowing Circle
Not every brahmin was a sage. Not every sage was wise. Not every wise person was enlightened.
The progression itself is the insight. Brahmin originally referred to social function: learning, ritual responsibility, a life oriented toward knowledge. It was never a guarantee of virtue. Wisdom required discernment, humility, ethical maturity – not merely knowledge or spiritual power. And enlightenment represented something rarer still, which the traditions kept circling: the dissolution of the separate self, freedom from craving and aversion, abiding equanimity.
These are not the same rung. They are not even on the same ladder.
The Mahabharata consistently distinguishes between those who know dharma, those who teach it, those who attempt to practise it, and those who actually embody it. Bhishma knew dharma and remained bound by his vows. Drona knew dharma and succumbed to partiality. Vidura understood it and came closest to living it. These are not failures of intelligence. They are failures of integration – the teaching has not fully transformed the character of the teacher.
And here the text issues what may be its most uncomfortable warning: the teacher who has glimpsed the summit has something real to offer. What he offers is the glimpse. He does not offer himself.
Teachers do not hand down themselves. They hand down what they have seen.
The disciple’s task – and this is where the essay’s human interest finally surfaces – is to receive what was seen without confusing it with the one who saw it.
The Aura and Its Distortions
This is where the ancient problem becomes a contemporary one.
The bhakt of today operates on the same cognitive architecture as the supplicant who approaches Durvasa with trembling hospitality. The aura of power – whether it derives from tapas, from political charisma, from intellectual celebrity, from the sheer confidence of someone who speaks with authority – generates a devotional response that is largely involuntary. We are wired for it. The concentrated presence of someone who appears to have gone further, endured more, and seen deeper than we have produces something in us that bypasses critical evaluation. We do not examine the teaching. We absorb the teacher.
The contemporary bhakt economy runs on this absorption. The guru’s anger is reinterpreted as righteous fire. His partiality is rendered as divine selectivity. His capacity for curse is proof of power rather than evidence of unresolved ego. Every human failing becomes occluded by the accumulated charge of the aura, and anyone who attempts to separate the teaching from the teacher is accused of insufficient devotion – which is to say, insufficient surrender to the aura itself.
The Mahabharata, with its strange honesty, refuses this closure. Vyasa – compiler of the text, himself a figure of enormous spiritual authority – presents sages who become angry, make questionable choices, show favouritism, curse impulsively. The text does not apologise for them. It does not explain them away. It seems to whisper, almost against itself: do not worship human beings. Learn from them.
Later tradition elevated many of these figures into saints more completely than the epics themselves did. The Mahabharata’s realism was softened by centuries of devotion that the text itself did not invite. This is not coincidental. The aura effect is persistent. It requires constant maintenance from the outside – a community of believers who need the teacher to be more than he was, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to sit with.
The alternative is this: that one may teach truths one has not fully embodied. That insight and integration are not the same achievement. That proximity to wisdom is not wisdom, and that the person sitting at the teacher’s feet must do the work of separation – not cynical rejection, not blind acceptance, but the daily, difficult labour of discernment.
What the Disciple Must Do
The Buddha, that most disciplined of teachers, gave his students a specific instruction on exactly this problem: examine my words as you would test gold – by burning, cutting, and rubbing it. Accept them not merely out of reverence.
That is a teacher undermining the aura effect from within the teaching relationship itself. It is a remarkable thing to do.
The Indian tradition offers the same wisdom in multiple registers. The Gita offers it through the sthita-prajna – measure the teacher against the ideal of the one who actually embodies equanimity, not merely the one who speaks of it. The Upanishads offer it through the emphasis on shruti – what is heard – rather than the one who speaks. The Mahabharata offers it through accumulated narrative evidence: here are your sages, magnificent and irascible; here is what their power looks like when ego remains unresolved; now go and think carefully about what you are inheriting.
Information changes the mind. Wisdom changes conduct. Enlightenment changes being.
The truly enlightened figures across traditions are rare and memorable because they did not merely speak differently. They were different. Conduct was continuous with character. The teaching was not separate from the one who taught it because the teacher had, to the extent humanly possible, disappeared into the teaching.
Most teachers have not done this. Most teachers are Durvasa before they are Krishna: formidable, often illuminating, genuinely in possession of something worth receiving – and still, unambiguously, themselves.
The disciple who understands this is not disillusioned. He is, at last, correctly positioned to learn. He can receive what the sage has seen without mistaking it for the sage’s sanction. He can honour the teacher without abdicating the discernment that makes the honour meaningful.
Revere the truth, not the personalities. Even sages may glimpse the summit without having entirely climbed it.
The teaching was always about the summit. The aura was always about the seer.
Those are not the same thing. The Mahabharata knew this. The question is whether we have been paying attention.
There is a form of teaching that does not announce itself. It does not draw conclusions, offer summaries, or tell you what to think at the end. It places a man before you in all his complexity – his courage, his blindness, his capacity for both loyalty and destruction – and then simply steps back. You are left to arrive at the lesson yourself, or not at all. The Mahabharata teaches this way. It has always taught this way. And perhaps no figure in the epic rewards this kind of patient attention more than the man at its centre: Duryodhana, Crown Prince of Hastinapura, Yuvaraja of the Kaurava faction, the architect of the greatest war the subcontinent had ever seen.
This essay is a companion to an earlier piece, When Appetite Wears a Crown, which argued that Duryodhana’s essential tragedy was the enthronement of appetite – desire promoted from servant to sovereign, mistaking itself for destiny. That argument stands. But there is a second question the epic quietly poses alongside it, one that belongs specifically to the domain of leadership: What does a man in a position of power owe those around him, and what happens when he has never been taught to ask that question?
The Mahabharata does not answer this directly. It shows us instead.
The Position He Occupied
To understand what the epic is doing with Duryodhana, it helps first to be precise about where he actually stands in the political architecture of the Kuru court.
He is not the king. Dhritarashtra holds that title, however compromised his claim, however diminished his authority. Duryodhana is Yuvaraja – heir presumptive, crown prince, the man waiting at the threshold of power.
He is not the commander-in-chief. Bhishma commands first, then Drona, then Karna, then Shalya. In each case, Duryodhana appoints; he does not lead from the field. He is the source of authority, not its expression.
He is not the supreme warrior. That honour is contested throughout the war among Bhishma, Arjuna, Karna, and Drona. Duryodhana is formidable – we will return to this – but the great martial set pieces belong consistently to others.
He is not the strategist. Krishna dominates that space entirely. Duryodhana has Shakuni, whose counsel is less strategy than manipulation, more cunning than wisdom.
What Duryodhana is, and what no one else in the epic can claim, is this: he is the indispensable cause of the war.
Without Duryodhana, Bhishma does not fight. Without Duryodhana, Drona does not fight. Without Duryodhana, Karna – that magnificent, tragic figure – never finds a reason to die. Shakuni’s schemes become irrelevant without the crown prince’s appetite to serve. The war exists because Duryodhana wills it into existence. Every alliance, every refusal, every burning of the lacquer house, every humiliation at the dice table – all of it traces back to one man’s insistence that what he wants is also what is right.
Modern leadership literature would have a word for this kind of person. It tends to call him a founder. The visionary who creates the conditions for everything that follows, who holds the entire enterprise together by the force of his conviction, whose departure or defeat would dissolve the whole structure into irrelevance. The epic, too, recognises this quality. What it goes on to examine is what happens when that quality exists without formation.
What the War Narrative Does Not Give Him
Here is the observation that opens a different kind of reading: Duryodhana receives far fewer sustained displays of battlefield heroism than several of the men who fight for him.
This is striking because it is not what we would expect. He is young, physically powerful, trained by Drona, a master of the mace – the Mahabharata itself confirms all of this. Yet in the war books, the narrative repeatedly displaces martial glory away from him. Bhishma receives the grandeur. Drona receives the brilliance. Karna receives the emotional investment. Ashwatthama receives the terrifying vengeance. Duryodhana, by contrast, spends much of the war encouraging others, grieving fallen allies, complaining about setbacks, questioning loyalties, urging troops forward.
He is the observer and the instigator, not the executor. This is not a failure of characterisation. It is a deliberate literary choice, and it carries a specific lesson.
The epic is showing us what it looks like when a leader has confused his position with his purpose. Duryodhana is perpetually at the periphery of the action he has caused. He mobilises the greatest assembly of warriors the world has seen, and then watches them fight his war for him – not because he lacks courage, but because mobilising others has become his primary mode of existing in the world. He is always at the centre of the politics and always at the edge of the consequences.
There is a kind of leadership that operates exactly this way. It mistakes the capacity to compel others for the capacity to lead them. It confuses the power to initiate with the wisdom to direct. It surrounds itself with capable people and then interprets their capability as a reflection of its own. Duryodhana has Bhishma, Drona, Karna, and Ashwatthama. By any rational account, he should be invincible. The Mahabharata is at least partly a meditation on why being surrounded by greatness is not the same as being great, and why the man who gathers extraordinary people around him still bears responsibility for what those people are asked to do.
The Scenes That Define Him
The moments that matter most in Duryodhana’s story are not battlefield exploits. The epic knows this. It gives him instead a series of scenes that are almost entirely verbal, relational, interior.
He refuses the needle’s point of land. He defends Karna before the assembled court at a moment when every other voice falls silent. He rebuffs Krishna’s final peace proposal – the moment when the god himself comes as ambassador, when the terms offered are extraordinarily generous, when every calculation of survival counsels acceptance. He hides in the lake after the war, exhausted and alone, the last man standing on the wrong side of the field. And then he emerges for his final duel, and he is astonishing.
This is the detail that the popular imagination often loses: when Duryodhana finally enters the war as its primary combatant, he is formidable beyond expectation. He withstands all five Pandavas. His mace combat with Bhima is described as evenly matched. Krishna himself grows anxious. The outcome is uncertain until the moment Bhima strikes below the waist – a blow outside the rules of honourable combat, signalled by Krishna as the only way to end it.
The implication is unambiguous. Duryodhana was not merely adequate. He was exceptional. The narrative chose not to foreground this until the end, which means his relative absence from the war’s heroic register was not a reflection of his limitations but a reflection of the role he had assigned to himself: the man who sends others forward.
And here the leadership lesson sharpens into something precise. The final duel reveals a man who could have led differently. Who had the courage, the physical capability, the sheer force of will. What he lacked was not strength. What he lacked was the formation that might have taught him to place that strength in service of something beyond his own claim.
The Admission He Made and Could Not Act Upon
There is a line attributed to Duryodhana that has the quality of an epitaph. Its precise wording varies across traditions and translations, but its substance is consistent:
I know what dharma is, but I cannot bring myself to follow it. I know what adharma is, but I cannot desist from it.
This is a confession of extraordinary self-awareness. It is also one of the most devastating descriptions of a leader’s failure that any text in any tradition has produced.
Duryodhana is not confused about the difference between right and wrong. He is not deceived. He is not acting under ignorance. He knows. And he acts anyway. The problem is not that he lacks instruction. The problem is that knowledge, in him, has failed to become formation. He has been told; he has not been changed.
This distinction matters enormously for anyone thinking seriously about what the epics teach. The Mahabharata is not naive about information. It is not suggesting that Duryodhana simply needed better advisors, more data, a clearer articulation of the ethical stakes. He had Vidura, one of the wisest men in the court, speaking plainly to him from childhood. He had Bhishma. He had his own mother’s prayers. The knowledge was never absent.
What was absent was the prior work of character – the slow, unglamorous formation of a self capable of acting on what it knows. The Mahabharata is unsparing about where this formation begins and ends. It begins in the household. It ends in the institution. Duryodhana grew up watched, indulged, and in perpetual competition with cousins whose mere existence felt like a refutation of his own. The court of Hastinapura formed him into exactly the kind of leader it then had to survive.
The Architecture of Loyalty and Its Costs
One of the qualities the epic explicitly praises in Duryodhana is his loyalty to Karna.
This matters because it complicates any simple dismissal. Duryodhana is not merely grasping and destructive. He is capable of genuine love, genuine recognition of worth in another human being, genuine willingness to defend that recognition at personal cost. His elevation of Karna – giving him a kingdom so that he can participate as an equal in the tournament, standing beside him when every voice of birth and convention condemns him – is one of the most consistent acts of decency in the epic.
And yet even this decency is entangled. Karna is loyal to Duryodhana in part because Duryodhana gave him something when the world gave him nothing. The loyalty runs both ways, but it is not free of obligation on either side. Duryodhana’s protection of Karna is real; it is also useful. The epic does not separate these cleanly. It holds them together and asks: does the goodness of an act become conditional on the purity of the motive? Or is goodness, when it appears, simply goodness, whatever else accompanies it?
This is a question about leadership as much as it is about ethics. Organisations are full of Karna-and-Duryodhana relationships: genuine affection, genuine mutual recognition, and yet also mutual dependence of a kind that makes it difficult for either party to tell the other what they actually need to hear. Duryodhana could not receive honest counsel from Karna because Karna owed him too much. Karna could not offer it because to do so would be to unravel the only belonging he had ever been given. The result was that two extraordinary men, capable between them of almost anything, ended up confirming each other in a direction that consumed them both.
The Mahabharata is precise about this. It does not blame their affection. It asks what affection is worth when it has never been tested by the harder form of love – the kind that is willing to disappoint in order to be honest.
What Heaven Refuses to Simplify
The essay that precedes this one ends with Duryodhana’s recognition of his own failure. But the Mahabharata does not end there. It has one more movement, and it is the most disorienting of all.
When Yudhishthira finally reaches heaven – after the war, after the interminable grief, after the slow death of everyone he loved, after the long ascent through cold and altitude and loss – he finds Duryodhana there. Resplendent. Honoured. Surrounded by celestial glory.
Yudhishthira is horrified. The reader is horrified. Every moral instinct recoils.
The explanation given is precise, and it is not a consolation. Duryodhana died as a Kshatriya. He faced the end without flinching. He fulfilled the dharma appropriate to his station as a warrior, and the cosmos, which does not operate according to simple moral arithmetic, rewarded him accordingly.
Yudhishthira’s disgust is not corrected. It is not resolved. It is allowed to stand. And this, I think, is the final teaching of the epic on the subject of leadership, and it is the hardest one.
The Mahabharata does not tell us that Duryodhana was secretly right, or that his cause was vindicated, or that the cosmos has a way of balancing accounts that the living cannot see. It tells us something far more uncomfortable: that a person can fail comprehensively in the moral dimensions of their leadership – can cause enormous, irreversible harm, can know better and refuse to act on that knowledge – and still participate in goods that are real. His courage was real. His loyalty was real. His willingness to die for what he believed, however wrongly he had come to believe it, was real.
The cosmos, in the Mahabharata’s accounting, does not erase these. It holds them alongside the failure. It refuses the simplification that would make either the failure or the virtue disappear.
For those who lead, this is the most demanding lesson the epic offers. It is not the lesson that virtue will be rewarded and vice punished in some final accounting that makes present choices easier. It is the lesson that you will be held to each dimension of your conduct separately, and that excellence in one dimension does not redeem failure in another. Duryodhana’s courage does not cancel his cruelty. His loyalty to Karna does not cancel his humiliation of Draupadi. His warrior’s death does not undo the war he chose not to prevent.
Heaven, in the Mahabharata, is not a simple destination. It is a kind of precision. Each thing is what it was.
The Lesson the Epic Does Not State
The great epics of India teach by accumulation and implication. They do not summarise at the end. They trust that a reader who has inhabited the narrative long enough will emerge with something that could not have been delivered as a proposition – a felt understanding of how character forms, how choices compound, how the man who could have changed everything becomes, instead, the man who changes everything in the worst possible way.
What the Mahabharata shows, through Duryodhana, is that leadership capacity and leadership formation are not the same thing. Capacity is the raw material: the intelligence, the courage, the charisma, the ability to mobilise others, the physical and psychological force that makes a person difficult to ignore. Duryodhana had all of this in abundance. What he lacked was the second thing: the slow work of becoming a self that holds its own capacity accountable, that can receive counsel without interpreting it as threat, that can distinguish between what it wants and what it is for.
This formation – the Mahabharata is unflinching about this – does not happen automatically. It requires institutions that expect it. Courts that demand it. Elders who model it. A culture of inheritance that asks the heir not merely to receive power but to be worthy of it before they receive it.
Hastinapura failed to produce this. It produced, instead, a young man of extraordinary ability who was never seriously required to examine whether that ability was oriented toward anything beyond itself.
The epic does not tell us this lesson. It places Duryodhana before us – his strengths undimmed, his failures undisguised, his end both honourable and devastating – and steps back.
The rest is what we do with what we have seen.
This essay is part of the Ruminating series on Indian thought, literature, and the textures of civilisational inheritance.
