GyaniNani's Reading Room

Tag: lifefull-circle-foundation

  • 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

  • Why are women still dying behind the closed door

    https://deepalibhattacharya.substack.com/p/why-are-women-still-dying-behind?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=d9hgp

  • The Prophet Dialogues- series #001

    The Prophet Dialogues
    Conversation One | The Coming of the Ship

    There were only three of us in our first Prophet Dialogue — Dr. Indu Prakash Singh, Deepali Bhattacharya and Tathagat Dwij.

    We began with The Coming of the Ship, the opening chapter of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. But very soon, we were moving in and out of Gibran — into Kabir and Tennyson, Kafka and Dostoevsky, psychology and philosophy, science and spirituality, and, inevitably, our own lives.
    Maybe that is how The Prophet is meant to be read.
    Not explained. Not analysed line by line. But allowed to take us somewhere.
    We return to books as different people
    There was something deeply personal about beginning these dialogues.
    Nearly thirty years ago, Indu ji introduced Deepali to The Prophet. She has returned to it many times since. Now, after all these years, the two were sitting together again with the same book open before them — this time with Tathagat bringing another generation and another way of seeing to the conversation.
    Indu ji said something that stayed with us. He may have introduced The Prophet to many people over the years, but Deepali had carried it forward and had now brought them back together around it.
    The book was the same.
    We were not.
    And that is probably why an old book can suddenly become new again.
    What do we leave behind when we leave?
    Almustafa has waited twelve years for the ship that will finally take him home. When he sees it, he is filled with joy.
    And sorrow.
    That contradiction drew us in.
    Indu ji stopped at Gibran’s image of Almustafa leaving “fragments of the spirit” in the streets of Orphalese.
    Can we ever really leave a place where we have lived deeply? Or a relationship? Or even a particular time in our lives?
    We move on, but some part of us remains.
    And some part of what we leave behind travels with us.
    Almustafa wants to go home. His sadness does not make that desire less real. It simply tells us that departure and attachment can exist together.
    Leaving does not mean we have stopped loving.
    What happens when it becomes quiet?
    Then came Gibran’s “seeker of silences.”
    Tathagat stopped there.
    He looked at silence through psychology. When the outside noise disappears — sounds, images, conversations, distractions — the mind begins to encounter itself. Thoughts start churning. Sometimes something emerges from that silence: an insight, an understanding, even an epiphany.
    But he added a caution.
    Just because a thought feels profound does not make it true.
    We can become intoxicated by our own thinking. We can build explanations about ourselves and the world and then start treating those explanations as reality.
    That is where the seeker has to be careful.
    The conversation moved naturally from here to Kafka’s Letter to His Father, Dostoevsky and existential thought — to the uncomfortable inner territories of fear, guilt, freedom, relationships, alienation and self-deception.
    And suddenly The Prophet did not feel like a “spiritual book” at all.
    It felt like a poetic way of entering some of the hardest emotional questions of being human.
    The lantern is mine. The flame is not.
    Indu ji kept returning to Almustafa’s humility.
    After all his years of contemplation, Almustafa still does not say: I possess wisdom.
    Instead, Gibran gives us the image of the lantern.
    The lantern may be mine. The flame is not.
    That changes the meaning of knowledge.
    We may carry it. We may give it a form. But can we really claim to be its source?
    Then came another image — the harp and the flute.
    And from Gibran, the conversation travelled to Kabir.
    Deepali remembered the imagery of Kabir’s Nirgun tradition, where the human body itself becomes a dwelling, a fort, containing within it different centres of life and consciousness — awake in some places, sleeping in others. The body is not simply a physical shell. It is through this body that we experience life and seek a connection with something beyond ourselves.
    That made Gibran’s flute feel strangely familiar.
    A flute has a body. It has openings. It has form.
    But there is no music until breath passes through it.
    So what are we?
    The music?
    The flute?
    The breath?
    We did not try to settle the question.
    That was the beauty of it.
    How can a drop be boundless?
    Then Indu ji stopped us at one extraordinary phrase:
    “A boundless drop to a boundless ocean.”
    The ocean being boundless is easy enough to imagine.
    But the drop?
    How can a drop be boundless?
    Indu ji brought in the idea of purna — the whole, the complete. If the drop comes from the whole, can it ever be entirely separate from it?
    Deepali responded from science.
    Think of a single cell in the human body.
    Compared with the whole body, it is almost unimaginably small. Yet a nucleated cell carries genetic information associated with the whole organism. It is only one cell; it is certainly not the entire human being. And yet something of the blueprint of the whole is held within that tiny unit.
    That offered another way of thinking about Gibran’s drop.
    A drop does not become the ocean merely because it came from it. And yet the nature of the ocean is present in that drop.
    Maybe our smallness and our connection to something larger are not contradictions after all.
    We are the drop.
    We are part of the ocean.
    And something of the ocean is within us.
    Science and spirituality were not being used to prove each other. They simply gave us two different languages with which to wonder about the same thing.
    And then Indu ji picked up an old schoolbook…
    One of the loveliest moments of the conversation came almost casually.
    Indu ji reached for an old Class IX book — a 1975 edition — and read Tennyson to us.
    There was something wonderful about it.
    A poem sitting inside a schoolbook for more than fifty years suddenly entered a conversation in 2026 about Gibran.
    And around the same table were Kabir, Tennyson, Kafka and Dostoevsky.
    Not because we had planned an impressive list of writers to discuss.
    One thought simply led to another.
    That is what good conversations do.
    “You have given us dreams to dream”
    This was one of the lines that held Deepali.
    What an extraordinary thing to say to another human being:
    You gave us dreams to dream.
    Sometimes a person enters our life and does not give us anything tangible.
    They simply make possibility visible again.
    Their energy, ideas, questions or way of looking at life awaken something that had become quiet inside us.
    Maybe this is what mentors do too.
    They do not hand us our dreams.
    They help us discover that we can still dream.
    “Disclose us to ourselves”
    Towards the end, we came to the line that stayed with all three of us in different ways.
    The people of Orphalese do not simply ask Almustafa to tell them what he knows.
    They ask him to “disclose us to ourselves.”
    Tathagat brought us back to psychology.
    To see ourselves requires honesty. Not the version of ourselves we present to other people, but the stories we tell ourselves when nobody else is listening.
    We can deceive other people.
    The more dangerous deception begins when we start deceiving ourselves.
    And suddenly this line connected with so much of what we had already discussed.
    The seeker of silence.
    The lantern and its flame.
    The flute and the breath.
    The drop and the ocean.
    Maybe the Prophet is not there to fill people with his wisdom.
    Maybe he is there to help them recognise something that is already within them.
    And that may also explain why three people could sit with the same chapter and find three different doors opening.
    One came through philosophy and spirituality.
    One through lived experience, Kabir and science.
    One through psychology and existential thought.
    None cancelled the other.
    They made the room larger.
    That, more than anything, was our first Prophet Dialogue.
    We began with one chapter.
    We ended up talking about leaving and belonging, silence and thought, knowledge and humility, the body and the divine, the individual and the infinite, teachers, dreams and the difficult business of knowing ourselves.
    There were no conclusions as we have just arrived at the port waiting to jump in.
    In fact, there is no need to conclude too for our conversation has begun.

    The Prophet Dialogues
    Three readers. Different ways of seeing. One conversation that continues.



  • The THOUGHT PAN- Conversations #2

    Cooking ideas slowly. Testing them carefully. Serving them freely.

    Counting vs Measuring

    When did counting become the same as measuring change?

    We counted 500 women trained.
      We counted 300 livelihoods created.
    We counted 20 villages reached.
    And yes, these numbers matter.
    But after years of working with communities, I increasingly find myself asking a different question:
    What actually changed?
    A woman may have been trained. But does she now earn?
    She may earn. But does she decide how that money is spent?
    She may have joined an enterprise. But can she travel independently to the market, negotiate with a buyer, open and operate her own bank account, or decide what happens to her income?
    And perhaps an even more uncomfortable question:
    Did the programme reduce any of her burdens—or did we simply add “entrepreneur” to the many roles she was already expected to perform?
    Our dashboards are very good at counting participation.
    They are less comfortable measuring agency, negotiation, dignity, confidence and shifts in power.
    That is where quantitative evidence needs to sit beside qualitative enquiry, observation and conversations that allow us to understand not only what changed, but why, for whom—and whether that change really mattered.
    Because 500 women participating in a programme is an achievement.
    But 500 women having greater control over their lives?
    That is change.
    A shift in numbers tells us what happened.
    A shift in agency tells us whether development happened.


    — Deepali Bhattacharya


    THOUGHT PAN | Shift the measure. Shift the meaning.

  • THE THOUGHT PAN CONVERSATIONS — #1

    When Does Freedom Become Agency?


    An Independence Day reflection on women, empowerment and the things we sometimes count too quickly.

    Happy Independence Day.

    Today, as we celebrate freedom, I find myself thinking about a word that we use very easily in the development sector:

    Empowerment.

    For decades, I have heard—and probably used myself—sentences such as:

    We empowered 500 women.

    The programme empowered women economically.

    Women were empowered through Self-Help Groups.

    And somewhere along the way, I began to feel uncomfortable with this language.

    Can I really empower another woman?

    Can an organisation empower her?

    Can a project?

    Or is empowerment something that happens when the conditions around a woman change sufficiently for her own agency to expand?

    That distinction may sound like semantics.

    I don’t think it is.

    Put it in the Thought Pan

    Consider a woman who has started earning ₹5,000 every month.

    Our programme data may record her as economically empowered.

    But suppose she cannot decide how that ₹5,000 will be spent.

    What exactly has changed?

    Now consider another woman who has joined a Self-Help Group. She attends every meeting. Her attendance is excellent. She participates in training programmes.

    But at home, she still cannot decide whether she can visit the health centre, travel to the market, buy something for herself or allow her daughter to continue her education.

    What exactly have we measured?

    Or consider the woman whose name appears proudly against the indicator:

    “Women with access to formal banking.”

    She has a bank account.

    But her husband keeps the passbook.

    Someone else knows the PIN.

    Someone else decides when money is withdrawn.

    She has access.

    Does she have control?

    Participation is not agency

    This is where development language sometimes gets ahead of lived reality.

    We count women who attended.

    Women who received.

    Women who enrolled.

    Women who opened accounts.

    Women who were trained.

    Women who received livelihood assets.

    Women who became members of committees.

    All of these matter. They may be important first steps.

    But they are not necessarily evidence of agency.

    Because participation is not agency.

    Access is not control.

    And an output is not necessarily a change.

    A livelihood asset may enter a household without changing who makes decisions.

    A bank account may be opened without changing financial power.

    A woman may sit on a village committee without anyone listening when she speaks.

    And sometimes a programme can improve a woman’s income while leaving her control over her time, mobility and choices almost untouched.

    This is precisely why numbers alone have never been enough for an evaluator.

    The number tells us what happened.

    We still need to ask why, how—and for whom did it actually change something?

    So what can programmes do?

    Perhaps we need to become a little more modest about our role as evaluators.

    We cannot give another human being agency.

    But we can help create the conditions in which agency becomes possible.

    We can create access.

    We can remove barriers.

    We can redistribute resources and opportunities.

    We can create safe spaces for women to organise.

    We can strengthen knowledge and skills.

    We can challenge discriminatory institutions.

    We can make systems listen.

    We can ensure that women have information, networks, resources and choices that were previously denied to them.

    And then something important can begin to happen.

    A woman decides.

    A woman negotiates.

    A woman refuses.

    A woman chooses.

    A woman speaks—and expects to be heard.

    Perhaps that is where empowerment begins.

    Freedom from. Freedom to.

    On Independence Day, this distinction feels particularly important.

    Freedom is not only freedom from something.

    It is also freedom to.

    Freedom to choose.

    Freedom to speak.

    Freedom to earn—and decide.

    Freedom to move.

    Freedom to participate—and influence.

    Freedom to aspire.

    Freedom to say yes.

    And, equally importantly, freedom to say no.

    For women, perhaps the real question is therefore not simply:

    “Has she been included?”

    But:

    “Has her universe of choices expanded?”

    And even more importantly:

    “Can she act upon those choices?”

    That is a much harder thing to measure.

    But perhaps it is also the thing most worth measuring.


    Something to keep stirring

    This Independence Day, I am leaving one question in the Thought Pan:

    «If a woman participates in development but does not gain greater control over the decisions that shape her life, can we really call it empowerment?»

    I don’t have a neat answer.

    That is precisely why it belongs here.

    Some ideas need to be cooked slowly.

    Tested carefully.

    Questioned repeatedly.

    And shared freely.

    Happy Independence Day.

    May our understanding of freedom continue to deepen—not only as independence, but as the everyday ability of every person to exercise choice, voice and agency.

    Shift in language. Shift in mindset.


    THE THOUGHT PAN CONVERSATIONS

    Cooking ideas slowly. Testing them carefully. Serving them freely.

    Every Saturday, we put one familiar idea back into the pan—and see what happens when we stir it again.

  • Why The Prophet?

    11 Conversations on parenting, love and letting go

    Inspired by The Prophet by Kahlil Jibran

    A personal Journey

    From a carefree, naive wanderer

    To a lifelong seeker of questions.

    Not because life became easier, but one small book quietly changed the way I looked at the world.

    Walk with us..

    The first conversation begins this friday…

    Welcome to The Prophet Dialogues

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part 8

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

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

    PART VIII

    When Fear Begins to Shrink Our Lives

    “The purpose of fear is to protect life—not to replace it.”

    Fear has a curious habit.

    It begins by asking us to be careful.

    Slowly, almost invisibly, it begins asking us to stop living.

    A young woman avoids evening classes.

    An elderly couple stops travelling.

    Parents no longer allow children to play outside.

    A commuter changes jobs to avoid public transport.

    Each decision appears reasonable in isolation.

    Together, they slowly reduce the size of life.

    TD introduced another important idea here—maladaptive fear. 17

    Healthy fear helps us adapt.

    It makes us alert.

    It encourages preparation.

    Maladaptive fear does something different.

    It convinces us that the safest life is the smallest life.

    Ironically, this is often strengthened by relentless exposure to dramatic news.

    Every notification.

    Every breaking alert.

    Every forwarded video.

    Our minds begin to mistake repetition for increasing danger. 18

    Yet the world is rarely as simple as our news feeds.

    Acts of extraordinary violence deserve attention.

    But they should not become the only stories we consume.

    Because while violence deserves visibility, kindness deserves memory too.

    Every day, people rescue strangers after accidents.

    Neighbours donate blood.

    Passengers intervene to protect women.

    Teachers notice silent suffering.

    Friends stay back after everyone else has left.

    These stories rarely become breaking news.

    Yet they are equally true.

    If we only remember violence, we begin believing that violence is all there is.

    It is not.

    Humanity has always contained both cruelty and compassion.

    Our emotional health depends partly on remembering both.

    A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…

    If fear becomes smaller when we act, what does action actually look like for ordinary people?

    Notes:

    16.  The concept originates with Halbwachs (1950/1992): memory is not only individual but socially framed — communities preserve, transmit and reinterpret the past together.

    17.  On how avoidance sustains fear: Foa and Kozak (1986) show that fear structures persist precisely when avoidance prevents corrective emotional processing — the avoided train can never teach the mind that it is, in fact, usually safe.

    18.  Gerbner and Gross (1976) documented the “mean world syndrome” — heavy consumers of violent media overestimate real-world danger; Thompson et al. (2019) trace a modern cycle in which distress drives further media consumption, which deepens distress.

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part 7

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

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

    PART VII

    Why Old Wounds Never Really Leave

    “Communities remember far longer than newspapers do.”

    There are moments in history that become reference points.

    Ask people where they were during a major earthquake, a terrorist attack or a national tragedy, and many can answer almost instantly.

    Not because they were present.

    But because the event became part of their collective memory. 16

    After the recent train murder, I heard several people say the same thing.

    “It reminded me of 26/11.”

    The comparison was not about numbers.

    It was about emotion.

    When I asked TD why old tragedies return so easily, he explained the idea of collective trauma. 15

    Unlike personal trauma, collective trauma belongs to an entire community. It becomes part of the stories people tell, the fears they inherit and the way future events are interpreted.

    A new incident does not arrive alone.

    It awakens older memories.

    This is true not only for acts of terrorism.

    Communities affected by riots, displacement, recurring floods or long histories of violence often carry invisible emotional maps. A loud sound, a familiar location or even a news headline can reopen emotions that had never completely healed.

    Perhaps this is why healing requires more than time.

    Time passes.

    Memory remains.

    The challenge before society is not to erase painful memories. That is neither possible nor desirable.

    The challenge is to prevent painful memories from becoming permanent prisons.

    Collective memory can become a source of wisdom.

    Or it can become a source of perpetual fear.

    The difference lies in how societies remember.

    Do we remember only the horror?

    Or do we also remember the courage of ordinary people who helped one another?

    History offers both.

    What we choose to pass on matters.

    A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…

    When does healthy caution quietly become a life governed by fear?

    Notes:

    15.  Erikson (1976), studying the Buffalo Creek flood, first described trauma that damages the tissue of community itself; Hirschberger (2018) reviews how collective trauma becomes part of a group’s identity and meaning-making across generations.

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Part 6

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

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

    PART VI

    “That Could Have Been Me”

    “Fear is not only about danger. It is about nearness.”

    A few days after the train murder, I found myself listening to conversations in different places. At a café. In a waiting room. During a taxi ride. People were discussing the same incident, but their reactions were strikingly different.

    One young woman who travelled daily by local train admitted that she had barely slept the night after watching the video.

    An elderly gentleman who mostly travelled by car said, “Terrible incident… but these things happen.”

    Neither response was wrong.

    They were simply different.

    When I mentioned this to TD, he smiled.

    “The mind asks only one question before it measures risk,” he said.

    “Could that have been me?”

    Psychologists call this risk perception. Interestingly, our perception of risk is rarely based on statistical probability. It is shaped by familiarity, proximity and imagination. 13

    A commuter who boards the same train every day does not see a random incident. She sees herself standing in that compartment.

    A parent watching news of violence against children imagines their own son or daughter.

    A young bride hearing of another dowry death quietly wonders about her own future.

    Fear becomes personal long before danger becomes probable.

    This is why two people watching the same news bulletin often walk away with entirely different emotions.

    The event is the same.

    The imagination is different.

    Years ago, while interacting with women in rural communities, I noticed something similar. Women routinely described walking long distances before sunrise or after sunset because they had no choice. When I asked whether they were afraid, many replied, “Yes. But we still have to go.”

    Their fear had not disappeared.

    Life had simply left them with fewer alternatives.

    Risk perception is therefore never only psychological. 14

    It is also social.

    Economic circumstances.

    Gender.

    Age.

    Disability.

    Occupation.

    All shape how close danger feels.

    Perhaps this is why public policy must listen not only to crime statistics but also to people’s lived experiences of safety.

    Because people do not live according to probability.

    They live according to perception.

    And perception shapes behaviour.

    A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…

    If fear grows through imagination, can memory make that fear last long after the event has passed?

    Notes:

    13.  The classic account is Slovic (1987): lay risk perception tracks dread, familiarity and controllability rather than probability. Loewenstein et al. (2001) formalise this as “risk as feelings” — emotional reactions to risk routinely diverge from cognitive assessments and often drive behaviour.

    14.  Kasperson et al. (1988) call this the social amplification of risk: social position, communication channels and institutional response amplify or attenuate how dangerous an event feels to different groups.

  • Beyond the Breaking News-Epilogue

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

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

    Epilogue

    As I finished writing these reflections, I realised that this series was never really about one train, one crime or one headline.

    It was about us.

    About how we respond when violence enters our lives—not always directly, but through the stories we hear, the images we carry and the memories we inherit.

    The questions in these pages do not belong to psychologists alone.

    They belong to commuters.

    Parents.

    Teachers.

    Police officers.

    Journalists.

    Policy-makers.

    Neighbours.

    And to every one of us who has ever looked at a disturbing headline and wondered,

    “What is happening to us?”

    Perhaps the better question is,

    “What are we going to do next?”

    Because, in the end, TD’s final words remain the simplest and perhaps the wisest:

    “Keep living your life. What you are going to do matters more.”

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