GyaniNani's Reading Room

Tag: faith

  • I Have Walked Away Too Quickly

    A GyaniNani confession about anger, regret, dhairya — and learning to stay long enough for the story to change.


    I have walked away too quickly from many things in life.

    Most often, from jobs.

    When I felt deeply hurt, angry or unfairly treated, my instinct was rarely to wait. I would react. Sometimes I would argue. Sometimes I would simply decide that I had had enough.

    And then I would resign.

    There was something almost satisfying about the decisiveness of it.

    If you don’t value me, I am leaving.

    If this is unjust, I will not tolerate it.

    If I am unhappy, why should I stay?

    At that moment, walking away often felt like courage.

    Wisdom usually arrived later.

    Sometimes much later.

    Then came the questions.

    Could I have handled that differently?

    Could I have stayed and fought instead of leaving?

    Could I have waited until the anger settled before making a decision that would affect the next several years of my life?

    Some of those decisions cost me professionally. Some brought financial insecurity. And some left me wondering whether what I had called courage was, at least partly, impatience.

    So today, when I write about धैर्य — dhairya, I am certainly not writing as someone who has mastered it.

    That would be dishonest.

    I am writing as someone who is still learning.

    Perhaps I have simply become a little better at creating a space between feeling and acting.

    And increasingly, I wonder whether that small space is where peace begins.

    Slowly, slowly…

    There is a Kabir doha I have heard countless times:

    “धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय।
    माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ऋतु आए फल होय॥”

    Slowly, slowly, O mind. Everything happens in its own time. The gardener may pour a hundred pots of water, but the fruit comes only in its season.

    I understood the words.

    I am not sure I understood the wisdom.

    As a working mother, I spent years negotiating calendars.

    School timings. Office timings. Homework. Illnesses. Meetings. Children’s activities. Travel. Deadlines.

    I had a husband who was—and remains—extraordinarily supportive.

    Yet I still wanted to do everything myself.

    I wanted to be available to my children. I wanted my work to continue. I wanted the household to function. And somewhere in all this, I think I also wanted my children to become independent quickly.

    Perhaps many working mothers will recognise this contradiction.

    We want our children to need us.

    And simultaneously, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day, we desperately want them not to need us quite so much.

    My children did become independent.

    But not because I hurried them into becoming so.

    It happened slowly.

    They stumbled. They learnt. They managed. I really thank them for their patience with me.

    They became strong.

    They became resilient.

    And somewhere along the way, I became resilient too.

    My husband, of course, seems to have possessed that resilience long before the rest of us discovered it.

    Looking back, I understand Kabir differently.

    You can water the tree.

    You can nurture it.

    You can protect it.

    You can show up every day.

    But you cannot command the season.

    There are things in life that will simply not ripen because we are impatient for them to do so.

    When passion takes over the rudder

    Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet:

    “Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.”

    I wish I had listened to my parents who always tried to amke me calm. Wish my younger self had good ears.

    I had plenty of sail.

    I have always cared deeply about my work. About fairness. About women. About children. About injustice. About doing things properly.

    That passion has given me tremendous energy throughout my life.

    But passion can also make you respond very quickly when you believe something is wrong.

    At several points in my professional life, I allowed the sail to take over the boat.

    I felt wronged.

    I became angry.

    I responded.

    And sometimes, I left.

    Later, when the storm had passed, reason would quietly return and ask:

    Was resignation really the only response available to you?

    Sometimes it was.

    Leaving an unhealthy situation can be an act of courage.

    But I also know now that not every battle has to be fought by leaving the battlefield. Did Arjun leave the battlefield in Mahabharata after seeing his guru and grandfather on the other side? No, he didn’t. May be because he had the lord- Krishna as his guide.

    Sometimes staying requires greater courage.

    Sometimes negotiating requires greater courage.

    Sometimes waiting for your anger to settle requires greater courage.

    Dhairya is not submission.

    It does not mean tolerating injustice.

    It does not mean becoming so “peaceful” that other people are allowed to walk over you.

    Perhaps dhairya simply gives reason enough time to reach the rudder before passion steers the entire boat.

    Then Buddhism found me….as I didn’t have patience to look for wisdom.

    One professional experience taught me this more powerfully than anything else.

    There was a period when a senior colleague was extremely unhappy with me.

    Our relationship deteriorated badly.

    Some colleagues around us added their own stories about me—many of them untrue—and the environment became increasingly hostile.

    It seemed that every possible difficulty was being created for me.

    I wanted to leave.

    Of course I did.

    That was what I knew how to do.

    But this time I was also deeply broken. There were days when I could barely imagine how I would continue through the situation.

    And somewhere during that period, Buddhism appeared in my life.

    The Dhammapada says:

    “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.”

    It sounds beautiful when printed on a page.

    It is considerably less beautiful when you are expected to practise it with someone who is making your life miserable.

    I struggled.

    Then I began trying something that initially felt almost absurd.

    I started praying for him.

    Not for his defeat.

    Not for him to receive some cosmic punishment.

    Not even for him to suddenly realise that I was right.

    I tried to pray for his happiness.

    For his wisdom.

    For something good to happen in his life.

    Initially, I probably said the words without feeling them very deeply.

    But I continued.

    And slowly, something changed.

    I cannot claim that my prayers magically transformed another human being.

    That would make a much neater story than life usually provides.

    But I know something changed inside me.

    I was no longer waking each day carrying quite the same amount of anger.

    I began seeing the situation differently.

    I stayed.

    And life moved.

    Eventually, he received a better professional opportunity and moved on.

    My own circumstances improved.

    Years passed.

    And here is the part of the story that still makes me smile:

    Today, we are on very good terms.

    Imagine if I had walked away at the height of my anger.

    Perhaps I would have carried another wound.

    Perhaps another professional relationship would have ended bitterly.

    Perhaps I would still remember him only as “the man who made my life miserable.”

    Instead, I stayed long enough to see the story change.

    That experience gave me a sentence I now believe far more deeply than any quotation I could borrow:

    Dhairya can change the ending.

    Not always.

    Some situations must be left.

    Some relationships must end.

    Some injustices must be challenged immediately and fiercely.

    Patience should never become an excuse for tolerating abuse or silencing resistance.

    But sometimes, the ending we can see from inside our anger is not the only ending available.

    We simply cannot see the others yet.

    What does this have to do with peace?

    Perhaps everything.

    Perhaps very little.

    I am careful here.

    Wars do not happen because two people simply forgot to be patient.

    Wars emerge from histories, inequalities, power, territory, ideology, political ambition, fear, oppression and competing claims to justice.

    Dhairya is not a substitute for politics, diplomacy or justice.

    And yet…

    Every large conflict is also lived through human minds.

    Someone feels threatened.

    Someone strikes.

    Someone retaliates.

    The retaliation becomes justification for another retaliation.

    Positions harden.

    Listening becomes betrayal.

    Compromise becomes weakness.

    Eventually, each side possesses a long list of reasons why it is the other side that must stop first.

    And I find myself wondering:

    At what point in that chain did we lose the capacity to pause?

    Not to surrender.

    Not to abandon justice.

    Not to tell the oppressed to wait patiently for their suffering to end.

    But to pause long enough to ask:

    Must the next response resemble the previous one?

    Have we understood what the other side fears?

    Can strength sometimes mean restraint?

    Can we remain firm without becoming consumed by hatred?

    Thich Nhat Hanh, who knew the devastation of war intimately, expressed an idea with extraordinary simplicity:

    “Peace in oneself, peace in the world.”

    I understand that sentence differently today too.

    Inner peace does not mean withdrawing from an unjust world and meditating while everything burns around us.

    Perhaps it means ensuring that when we enter the struggle, we do not carry so much unexamined anger that we reproduce the very violence we claim to oppose.

    And perhaps dhairya requires humility

    There is another uncomfortable companion to patience.

    Humility.

    Because sometimes the reason we cannot wait is not urgency.

    It is certainty.

    I know I am right.

    I know what happened.

    I know why you did it.

    I know what must happen next.

    Age has made me less certain about certainty.

    I have been right many times.

    I have also been absolutely certain—and wrong.

    So these days I am trying to learn three sentences:

    I may be wrong.

    I may not know the whole story.

    I do not have to answer today.

    That last sentence would have been almost impossible for my younger self.

    Even now, I do not always manage it.

    I still become impatient.

    I still get angry.

    I still occasionally respond and then think, Deepali, you could have waited.

    So no, this is not a GyaniNani announcing that she has finally attained wisdom.

    Far from it.

    It is a GyaniNani confessing that wisdom seems to arrive in instalments—often after we have already paid rather heavily for the lesson.

    But I am learning.

    To pause.

    To wait.

    To allow the first wave of anger to pass.

    To ask whether I need to win this argument today.

    To remember that another person may be carrying a story I cannot see.

    And perhaps most importantly, to understand that waiting is not always weakness.

    Sometimes waiting is the moment in which we recover our freedom to choose.

    Without that pause, anger chooses for us.

    Fear chooses for us.

    Ego chooses for us.

    With it, another possibility appears.

    Perhaps this is what dhairya means to me now.

    Not sitting quietly while life happens.

    Not tolerating what should never be tolerated.

    Not becoming passive.

    But developing the strength to stay inside an uncomfortable moment without immediately trying to escape it, defeat it or retaliate against it.

    I am still learning that strength.

    Slowly.

    As Kabir would probably have expected.

    And perhaps that is all right.

    The gardener can continue watering.

    The season will come when it comes.

    One question from GyaniNani

    Has there ever been a moment in your life when waiting changed the ending of the story?

    I would genuinely like to hear it.

    — GyaniNani Reflects

  • The Prophet Dialogues — Conversation series #002

    Giving, Listening and the Courage to Step Back

    The Coming of the Ship — continued

    Deepali Bhattacharya | Dr. Indu Prakash Singh | Tathagat Dwij | Lynne

    Four people. Many perspectives. One chapter that took us far beyond the text.

    Our second conversation around Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet began where our first one had left us — with The Coming of the Ship. But very quickly, the conversation moved beyond Gibran.

    We found ourselves talking about life and death, the ego, money, giving, listening, participation, facilitation and empathy. And somewhere along the way, a question began to emerge:

    When we say we want to help another person, how much of that help is really about them — and how much is about us?

    We often enter spaces believing that we have something to give:

    knowledge,

    experience,

    resources,

    solutions.

    But what happens when we enter without first listening?

    Perhaps service begins not with what we have come to give, but with what we are prepared to hear.

    Giving — and the self that gives. Giving is usually understood as an act of generosity. Yet our conversation made us look at it a little differently.

    There can also be an ego hidden inside giving.

    We may decide what another person needs.

    We may arrive with solutions before understanding the question.

    We may even measure our contribution by what we have done rather than by what the other person has experienced.

    This becomes particularly important in development work. For those of us who work with communities, the distinction between doing for and doing with is not merely about language. It changes the relationship itself.

    Who defines the problem?

    Who decides what change should look like?

    And whose knowledge counts?

    Listening as participation

    The conversation then moved towards listening.

    Listening sounds passive, but perhaps it is one of the most active things we can do. To listen deeply requires us to temporarily suspend our own certainty. It means allowing another person’s experience to exist without immediately interpreting it through our own framework.

    This is also where participation becomes meaningful.

    Participation cannot simply mean inviting people into a process whose questions, boundaries and outcomes have already been decided elsewhere.

    Sometimes participation requires those of us who usually speak, design, teach or facilitate to step back.

    Not disappear.

    Not abandon our knowledge.

    But create enough space for another kind of knowledge to enter.

    Different voices,

    a shared journey

    Perhaps this is why reading The Prophet together feels so different from reading it alone.

    Each person enters the same words carrying a different life. A sentence that speaks about spirituality to one person may open a psychological question for another. A philosophical idea may suddenly become a question about society, development practice, relationships, money or everyday life.

    There is no attempt to arrive at one interpretation.

    The differences are the conversation.

    And perhaps that is what we are slowly discovering through The Prophet Dialogues.

    We are not trying to explain Gibran.

    We are allowing Gibran to become a doorway — into our experiences, our disagreements, our questions and occasionally into the uncomfortable assumptions we carry without noticing them.

    There are still no final answers.

    Only another layer of questions.

    And another reason to return.

    The Prophet Dialogues

    Reading slowly. Questioning deeply. Returning differently.

    Deepali Bhattacharya | Dr. Indu Prakash Singh | Tathagat Dwij | Lynne

    Yours GyaniNani.in

  • Podcast Episode: Violence Fear And Youth Inequality

    Pip: Welcome to GyaniNani’s Reading Room — where the questions that stay with you after the headlines fade are exactly the ones worth sitting with.

    Mara: This episode covers two stretches of territory: a multi-part series on how violence travels through public imagination and what it does to our sense of safety and agency, and a close look at youth addiction across the full sweep of class and circumstance in urban India.

    Pip: Let’s start with the violence series — and the uncomfortable question of which suffering we actually notice.

    Violence, Fear, and the Stories We Tell

    Pip: The series opens with a deceptively simple observation: some acts of violence become everyone’s fear, while others stay someone else’s tragedy. The question driving these posts is why — and what that gap reveals about us.

    Mara: Part Two puts it directly: “Not every act of violence enters the national conscience. That, too, tells us something about ourselves.” The piece builds from a field visit where a woman described hearing about another girl dying after marriage and said, matter-of-factly, that life goes on — no anger, no surprise, only acceptance.

    Pip: That sentence is the whole argument in miniature. When violence becomes routine enough that a grieving community greets it with resignation, we’ve moved past shock into something harder to name.

    Mara: Part One sets the psychological foundation. TD, the clinical psychologist in conversation throughout the series, says: “The mind does not count statistics. It remembers stories.” That’s why a single filmed murder on a train spreads fear into every compartment while years of domestic abuse stays behind closed walls.

    Pip: Visibility, repetition, novelty — the mind responds to framing, not frequency. Which is a polite way of saying our collective compassion has a very specific algorithm.

    Mara: Part Two makes that plain. Dowry deaths — the NCRB recorded 5,737 in 2024, roughly sixteen a day — rarely become national conversations. The piece argues that familiarity erodes shock: communities living with repeated violence may stop expecting justice, and what begins as adaptation quietly becomes acceptance.

    Mara: Part Three sharpens the wound further. When TD says “intention changes everything,” the post is getting at why deliberate violence leaves behind not just grief but doubt — a rupture in our assumption that people are basically decent.

    Pip: And Part Four lands on the crowd that watches. The bystander effect means the more witnesses there are, the less likely any one of them moves — responsibility diffuses until stillness feels like the appropriate response.

    Mara: Which brings the series to the question of agency. From the survivor’s side, a neighbor’s silence feels indistinguishable from indifference. The series argues that communities are built when responsibility stays personal — when we stop assuming someone else will intervene.

    Pip: That thread — from public fear to private silence to the cost of not acting — runs through all four parts. The series isn’t asking us to be heroes. It’s asking whether we’re paying attention.

    Mara: And that question of attention connects directly to another kind of invisible harm — one that plays out not in crowds but in the quieter geography of adolescence.

    Youth, Addiction, and the Shape of Emptiness

    Pip: The piece on youth addiction starts with the “trust fund kid” as a way in — not to mock the label, but to dismantle it. Wealth without necessity, it turns out, is its own kind of vulnerability.

    Mara: The argument is that both poles of the class spectrum can damage aspiration. The post puts it this way: “In privilege, aspiration may weaken because nothing feels necessary. In deprivation, aspiration may weaken because nothing feels possible.” One produces excess without purpose; the other produces struggle without hope.

    Pip: So the substance isn’t the story. The absence underneath it is.

    Mara: Exactly. The piece insists addiction is multifactorial — trauma matters, but so do biology, ADHD, peer culture, and the pharmacology of the substance itself. The real diagnostic question isn’t only what happened to this young person, but what function the substance is serving right now.

    Mara: And shame-based responses make it worse. When adults answer with punishment or ridicule, young people hide further. Recovery, the piece argues, requires both accountability and dignity.

    Pip: Which is a harder thing to build than a policy list — though the piece has one of those too, from early screening to community youth programmes to post-treatment relapse support.

    Mara: Both threads this episode come back to the same underlying question: what do we quietly learn to live with, and what does that cost us?

    Pip: Whether it’s the violence we stop noticing or the adolescent we stop asking about — the next conversation is always the one we almost didn’t have.

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part 5

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

    In conversation with TD, Clinical Psychologist  ·  An eleven-part reflection, with notes and references

    PART V

    Fear Is Not the Enemy

    “Before we learn how to overcome fear, we must first stop being ashamed of it.”

    One of the most reassuring moments in my conversation with TD came when I asked him whether people were overreacting.

    His answer surprised me.

    “No,” he said.

    “Fear is survival equipment.” 11

    I have carried that sentence with me ever since.

    We often speak about fear as though it were a weakness.

    Parents tell children not to be afraid.

    Leaders urge people to be fearless.

    Films celebrate those who appear untouched by danger.

    But psychology tells a different story.

    Fear is ancient.

    Long before human beings learnt to build cities or write constitutions, fear kept them alive.

    It warned them of predators.

    It prevented unnecessary risks.

    It prepared the body to respond quickly to danger.

    Without fear, our species would probably not have survived.

    The problem, therefore, is not fear.

    The problem is what happens after fear arrives.

    Some people deny it.

    Some become overwhelmed by it.

    Some quietly organise their lives around avoiding it.

    TD explained something that I found both comforting and practical.

    “The healthiest response,” he said, “is to begin by naming it.”

    “I am afraid.”

    Not because fear deserves control.

    But because unnamed fear often controls us.

    Psychologists have long observed that emotions become easier to regulate once they are acknowledged. 12

    The simple act of recognising fear reduces some of its power.

    Perhaps this explains why conversations matter.

    When people speak honestly about fear, they often discover they are not alone.

    The commuter who hesitates before boarding a train.

    The young woman returning home after work.

    The elderly man living by himself.

    The parents waiting for their child to come home.

    Their fears are different.

    Their humanity is the same.

    The goal is not to become fearless.

    The goal is to prevent fear from becoming the architect of our lives.

    Fear should inform our decisions.

    It should never imprison them.

    A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…

    If fear is natural, why do some people recover from frightening experiences while others remain trapped by them?

    Perhaps the answer lies in another psychological truth.

    We do not respond only to danger.

    We respond to how close that danger feels to us.

    Notes:

    11.  On fear as evolved protection, see Öhman and Mineka (2001) on the brain’s dedicated “fear module,” shaped by evolutionary threats and designed for rapid, automatic response.

    12.  This is affect labelling: Lieberman et al. (2007) showed that simply putting feelings into words dampens amygdala reactivity — neural evidence that naming an emotion begins to regulate it.