GyaniNani's Reading Room

Tag: violence-against-women

  • At Last, She Is a Farmer

    Maharashtra challenges a patriarchal history of land, labour and recognition

    Deepali Bhattacharya

    —  •  —

    There are some policy decisions whose significance cannot be understood by looking only at the document they create.

    A certificate can be just a certificate.

    But sometimes, a certificate challenges centuries of social conditioning.

    As Maharashtra prepares to issue its first Women Farmer Certificates, recognising women as farmers irrespective of whether the agricultural land is registered in their names, I believe we should understand this moment in precisely that way.

    Maharashtra has done something remarkable.

    It has challenged one of the oldest equations in our agrarian society: land belongs to the man, therefore the farmer is the man.

    The woman? She works. She sows. She transplants. She weeds. She harvests. She preserves seeds. She tends livestock. She manages household food security.

    But for generations, patriarchal society found another word for her: helper.

    That one word tells us a great deal about how patriarchy works.

    The history behind the invisibility

    Women’s secondary position in agriculture did not emerge because women contributed less. It emerged from a social order in which property, inheritance, authority and lineage were overwhelmingly organised around men.

    In some of my much earlier development work in Bihar, I wrote about the continuing influence of a feudal social order, alongside deeply entrenched caste structures, on women’s position. I described the interconnected workings of patriarchy, patrilineal inheritance and patrilocal marriage: property and family identity travelled largely through men, while women moved after marriage into the husband’s household, often without corresponding claims over productive assets.¹

    That history matters to the present discussion. Because land is not merely soil. Land has historically represented wealth, lineage, security, status and authority.

    When ownership became masculine, authority over agriculture became masculine too. And gradually we created an extraordinary contradiction: women could perform agricultural labour without acquiring agricultural identity.

    The patriarchal system did not necessarily prevent women from working. It depended upon their work. What it restricted was something more consequential: their claim to ownership, decision-making and recognition.

    West Bengal: “Men are farmers. Women are helpers.”

    Years later, while working with women farmers in West Bengal as Gender Specialist under the USAID–PepsiCo Integrated Land and Resource Governance programme implemented by Tetra Tech, I encountered the same structural problem in another form.

    Our work with Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) and Nurturing Connections looked beyond agricultural productivity to gender norms, household decision-making, unpaid care, productive resources, entitlements, voice and leadership.²

    One of the gender norms documented in the programme could hardly have stated the problem more starkly: “Men are farmers and women are their helping hand.” Alongside it were other assumptions: land belonged to men; women were not seen as property owners; men were expected to make agricultural decisions; technical agricultural knowledge was considered a male domain; and farming meetings and extension opportunities often went primarily to men.³

    Think about the circularity of that system. A woman is not considered a farmer, so she is not invited to agricultural training. Because she is not invited to training or formally engaged by agricultural institutions, the man becomes the recognised farmer. And because the man is recognised as the farmer, resources, information and institutional relationships continue to flow towards him.

    Patriarchy reproduces itself not merely through attitudes, but through systems.

    Even unpaid care becomes part of this arrangement. Women farmers carry substantial household and care responsibilities, leaving them time-poor and less able to participate in training and agricultural institutions.³

    Bihar: knowledge without ownership

    More recently, my work with women in north Bihar brought me face to face with another version of the same contradiction.

    Women involved in food sovereignty, indigenous seed conservation, kitchen gardens and sustainable agriculture possessed considerable knowledge. They could identify seed varieties, understand seasonal changes, preserve seeds, advise others about crops and manage household nutrition. Their participation in collectives expanded their confidence and their aspirations towards enterprise, markets, leadership and a stronger role in local decision-making.

    And yet, repeatedly, the conversation returned to the same place: the land was in a man’s name. Larger decisions around cultivation, sale and investment frequently remained with men. Engagement with banks or formal institutions could still require male mediation.

     

    The woman’s knowledge was visible; her authority over the asset was far less secure.

    From my work on Deconstructing Patriarchy

     

    A woman can know which seed will survive an uncertain monsoon. She can know when it should be planted. She can preserve it. She can teach other farmers. And still the land on which all this knowledge is exercised may not bear her name. This is what I have come to describe as knowledge without ownership.⁴

    Darbhanga: when livelihood begins to alter identity

    In Darbhanga, women had long participated deeply in agriculture — sowing, transplanting, weeding and harvesting — yet much of that labour remained absorbed into household responsibility rather than recognised as economic contribution.

    The introduction of makhana cultivation and more structured livelihood opportunities began to alter this relationship. Women began earning directly. They began handling money. They contributed to household expenditure. And gradually, they participated more in financial decisions.⁵

     

    “Now we earn, so we are also asked.”

    A woman participant in Darbhanga

     

    There is an entire theory of women’s empowerment contained in that one sentence. Now we earn. Therefore, we are also asked.

    But it also reveals how deeply unequal the original relationship was. Why should a woman need to demonstrate income before her opinion becomes worthy of being sought? Why should decades of agricultural labour not have been enough?

    This is precisely why recognition matters.

    Maharashtra: where something remarkable is happening

    And then I come back to Maharashtra.

    Here, my perspective comes not from implementing the programme but from evaluating the Women’s Initiative for Food Sovereignty in Sangamner and Akole. That distinction matters. As an evaluator, I had the opportunity to listen to women, field teams and partner institutions, examine what had changed over four years, and assess the evidence of change with some distance from implementation.

    The initiative reached around 400 rural and tribal women farmers. Eight community seed banks were established, conserving around 4,000 kg of indigenous grains. Women became involved in indigenous seed conservation, organic cultivation, value addition, Participatory Guarantee Systems and market linkages.⁶

    But the most significant shift I saw in the evidence was not simply agricultural. It was institutional and social.

    The community seed banks became collective spaces governed by women themselves — involving decisions about seed selection, preservation, exchange and cropping. Women who had earlier been perceived largely as agricultural helpers increasingly came to be recognised as farmers, seed custodians and decision-makers.⁷

     

    “Earlier we only worked. Now we decide.”

    A woman farmer in the Sangamner case study

     

    For me, those words connect directly with what Maharashtra is doing today. Earlier we only worked. Now we decide. And perhaps now we can add: now the state recognises us too.

    Why Maharashtra’s decision is a challenge to patriarchy

    This is why I hesitate to describe Maharashtra’s action merely as a welfare measure for women. It is potentially much more radical than that.

    Patriarchy survives partly because certain categories have been made to appear natural: the landowner is male; the head of the household is male; the farmer is male; the woman assists.

    But these categories were never natural. They were constructed through social norms, inheritance systems, property relations, institutional practices and generations of repetition.

    My work on Deconstructing Patriarchy has increasingly convinced me that patriarchy does not survive only by excluding women. It can also include women while retaining male authority. A woman may work, earn, acquire agricultural expertise, join a collective and even be celebrated for her contribution. But the crucial questions remain: Who owns? Who decides? Whose authority is recognised?

    Acceptance of women’s participation does not automatically mean acceptance of women’s authority. Development can expand women’s productive role while leaving the final location of decision-making substantially unchanged.⁸

    Maharashtra is now intervening precisely in that space between participation and recognition. That is why this matters.

    A policy recommendation becoming reality

    There is another reason this announcement feels particularly significant to me.

    In the policy document we developed for International Women’s Day 2026, after examining experiences from Maharashtra, Bihar and elsewhere, one of our recommendations to governments was remarkably straightforward: “Recognise women as farmers in official records.”⁹

    We made that recommendation because our own field evidence kept showing us the same contradiction. Women were central to agriculture but peripheral to ownership. Central to production but peripheral to recognition. Central to household food security but peripheral to agricultural institutions.

    In Sangamner, our IWD analysis explicitly noted that women were central to seed preservation, crop diversity and household nutrition management while remaining insufficiently recognised as farmers within formal and community structures.¹⁰

    And now Maharashtra is moving in exactly the direction we were asking governments to move. That deserves recognition.

    But recognition must lead towards power

    Celebration should not make us uncritical.

    A farmer certificate is not the same thing as ownership of land. Recognition cannot substitute indefinitely for inheritance rights, control over productive assets, access to finance or authority over agricultural income.

    My Bihar experience has taught me this particularly strongly. A woman may become recognised as a knowledgeable farmer, community mobiliser or seed keeper and still have limited control over the asset on which her work depends.

     

    Recognition is meaningful, but recognition without redistribution has limits.

    From my Deconstructing Patriarchy work

     

    Maharashtra therefore should not be seen as completing the journey. It has opened an important door. The next challenge is ensuring that recognition becomes entitlement, institutional access, bargaining power, decision-making authority and, increasingly, ownership.

    For today, Maharashtra deserves to be celebrated

    Women’s movements have fought for decades against the assumption that women’s work is secondary simply because it takes place inside families, on family farms or without an individual title attached to it.

    Across West Bengal, Bihar and Maharashtra, I have encountered different versions of the same woman.

    She knows the land. She knows the crop. She knows the seed. She knows when rain is late. She knows what the household will eat if the harvest fails. Often, she knows agriculture as intimately as — sometimes more intimately than — the person whose name appears on the papers.

    Yet history placed her beside the farmer rather than allowing her to be the farmer.

    Well done, Maharashtra.

    Not simply for issuing a certificate, but for confronting a patriarchal definition that should have been challenged long ago.

    For saying that ownership in a man’s name cannot make a woman’s labour disappear.

    For recognising that agricultural identity must arise from women’s contribution, knowledge and work — not only from a male-dominated history of property.

    And perhaps most importantly, for beginning to replace one of rural India’s oldest descriptions — “She helps him farm” — with one that women have earned through generations of labour:

    “She is a farmer.”

    That is not a small semantic correction. It is a redistribution of identity.

    And if Maharashtra can carry that recognition from paper into institutions, resources and decision-making, it may have done something even larger: shown India one way of challenging patriarchy from the ground beneath our feet.

    Notes and references from my own work

    1. Early Bihar development documentation: reflections on the feudal bent of rural and semi-urban society, caste, patriarchy, patrilineal inheritance and patrilocal marriage.

    2. Deepali Bhattacharya, Gender Specialist, Tetra Tech Development Services — USAID & PepsiCo / Integrated Land and Resource Governance (West Bengal), 2020–2022; work on GALS and Nurturing Connections.

    3. ILRG GALS Training Manual (West Bengal): gender norms affecting women’s recognition as farmers, land ownership, participation in agricultural decisions, extension services and unpaid care.

    4. Deepali Bhattacharya, Deconstructing Patriarchy: field vignette on “Knowledge without Ownership” and the distinction between participation and power.

    5. Darbhanga field documentation and case study: “From Invisible Labour to Recognised Farmers.”

    6. Impact Assessment Report 2025: Women’s Initiative for Food Sovereignty, Sangamner & Akole — 400 women farmers, eight community seed banks and approximately 4,000 kg of indigenous grains conserved.

    7. IWD 2026 Give to Gain policy document: Women-Led Seed Sovereignty & Agroecological Transition; Sangamner/Akole case evidence.

    8. Deepali Bhattacharya, Deconstructing Patriarchy: argument on the institutional reproduction of patriarchy and the difference between women’s participation and women’s authority.

    9. IWD 2026 Give to Gain policy document, Policy Recommendations for Governments: “Recognise women as farmers in official records.”

    10. IWD 2026 Give to Gain policy document: Sangamner evidence on women’s central role in seed preservation, crop diversity and household nutrition, alongside gaps in formal recognition.

    Author’s note: This article draws only on my own field experience, evaluation work, programme documentation, IWD 2026 policy writing and research drafts, alongside the Maharashtra announcement that prompted this reflection.

  • 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- Conversation 2

    Dialogue II — When Love Finds You

    A note on how this section is split. Gibran gives us three chapters here — Love, Marriage, Children — and they belong to one arc: love arrives, love asks for space, love releases. Two conversations carry it better than one. Dialogue II stays with love itself. Dialogue III takes the sea and the arrow together, because marriage and parenting are the same lesson learned twice.

    A note on TD.

    TD is a young psychologist. He has the vocabulary — attachment, vulnerability, individuation, regulation. That vocabulary is a gift and a hazard, and the dialogues should use both. He is not GyaniNani’s student. He is her companion, and roughly half the wisdom in these two conversations is his.

    Love possesses not nor would it be possessed.”

    GyaniNani and TD

    TD: Nani, I want to confess something before we start.

    GyaniNani: Confess.

    TD: I have read this chapter many times. I can quote parts of it. And I am not sure I understand it.

    When Gibran says love threshes you, sifts you, grinds you to whiteness — I understand every word. I do not understand the experience.

    GyaniNani: Then you have understood the chapter better than most people who quote it.

    TD: That is a kind way to let me off.

    GyaniNani: It is not kindness. Some things cannot be understood by reading. They have to be lived.

    TD: That is what struck me. When he writes about being wounded by love, about standing naked before it — he is describing something that happens in the body.

    The chest tightens. The stomach drops. The hands do not stay still.

    You feel somehow smaller.

    No dictionary explains that.

    GyaniNani: Language can describe an experience. Only life decodes it.

    Perhaps that is why people return to this book at different ages. The words do not change.

    The reader changes.

    TD: There is a name for what I just described, you know. In my training we call it interoception — the sense we have of our own insides. The body registers meaning before the mind can put it into a sentence.

    GyaniNani: And does the name help?

    TD: Usually, yes.

    GyaniNani: I ask because I have watched people receive a name for what they were feeling and go quiet in a way that worried me. As though the naming had settled it. As though a word had been placed over the thing like a lid.

    TD: That happens. I have done it myself.

    But I want to argue with you a little.

    GyaniNani: Please.

    TD: Some people come to me with no words at all. Only a body that will not sleep and a chest that will not loosen. For them a name is not a lid. It is the first handhold. It is the moment they stop believing they are broken and start believing they are describing something real.

    GyaniNani: (hmmm)

    I had not thought of it that way.

    I have spent thirty years worrying that we explain feelings too quickly. I have not spent enough time with the person who cannot name a single one.

    TD: I think both are true, Nani. A name given too early closes a door. A name given at the right time opens one.

    GyaniNani: Then perhaps the question is never whether to name it, but whether we are still curious after we have.

    A question, halfway through.

    Where in your body does love live? Not what it means to you. Where you feel it. One line.

    TD: Can I tell you what this made me think about?

    Parents.

    Parents keep saying, “One day you will understand.”

    As children we dismiss it. It sounds like another lecture in a long line of lectures.

    Then one day you fall in love.

    And those same words arrive with all their weight.

    GyaniNani: (smiles) Many parents are quietly waiting for that day.

    Not because they want their children to suffer.

    Because love makes us softer, and they are waiting for the softness.

    TD: Softer how?

    GyaniNani: Have you noticed it in your friends? Someone who argued with every suggestion suddenly understands what it is to worry for another person.

    To wait for a message.

    To lose sleep.

    To forgive without keeping the account open.

    To put someone else’s happiness beside their own and not resent it.

    That is usually when children begin to hear the language their parents had been speaking all along.

    TD: So a child understands a parent’s love only after loving someone themselves. Until then it is a beautiful sentence in a language they have not learned.

    GyaniNani: Yes. And you have just said in two sentences what I have been trying to say to parents for years.

    TD: Which raises something else I keep circling.

    Gibran wrote this in 1923. No attachment theory. No emotional regulation. None of the vocabulary I use every day.

    And he is describing all of it.

    GyaniNani: Be careful how you put that.

    TD: How so?

    GyaniNani: I nearly wrote once that psychology was “not yet evolved” in his time. It was the wrong sentence. There were serious people doing serious work in those years, and it diminishes them.

    What is truer is that psychology had not yet become part of ordinary speech. Today we say attachment, vulnerability, individuation over breakfast. Gibran had no such shelf to reach for. He had images.

    TD: So science gave us the concepts.

    GyaniNani: And poetry gave us the pictures. Neither replaces the other. Science measures. Poetry usually notices first.

    TD: Then let me ask the thing that has bothered me most about this chapter.

    Why is every single image of love in it painful?

    Pruning. Threshing. Sifting. Grinding. Kneading. Fire.

    That is a description of what happens to wheat, Nani. It is violent.

    GyaniNani: Because transformation is rarely comfortable.

    Notice that he does not stop at the fire. The wheat becomes bread. But nothing in that sequence lets the grain stay a grain.

    TD: In my field we would call the whole passage a description of vulnerability.

    GyaniNani: And Gibran simply called it love.

    (silence)

    TD: There is a line I underlined and then could not stop returning to.

    “Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.”

    Growth and pruning in one breath. Same hand.

    GyaniNani: That is the sentence that holds the chapter together, and almost nobody quotes it.

    We have made a culture that wants the growth without the pruning. We want to be expanded and never cut back.

    TD: And Gibran gives you the choice.

    GyaniNani: He does. And this is the part that frightens me.

    He says: if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, then cover yourself and leave love’s threshing-floor —

    “Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.”

    TD: A seasonless world.

    GyaniNani: A safe one. Nothing dies in it because nothing grows in it.

    I wrote one thing in my margin here, in pencil, years ago.

    Fear is the enemy of love.

    TD: That is what he is saying, isn’t it. Not hatred. Not indifference.

    Fear.

    GyaniNani: Fear is what makes us reach for the safe version. And the safe version is not a smaller love. It is a different world altogether — one where you never laugh with your whole laughter again.

    TD: Nani, I have to push back on something else you wrote.

    GyaniNani: Good.

    TD: Somewhere in your notes you wrote, Love is stillness.

    I disagreed immediately. This entire chapter is motion. The sword among the pinions. The north wind laying waste to the garden. The threshing-floor. Nothing about it is still.

    GyaniNani: You are right about the chapter.

    TD: Then why stillness?

    GyaniNani: Because I was not describing what love does. I was describing what love is.

    Think about what actually makes love noisy.

    Fear makes it agitated. Possession makes it anxious. Ego makes it loud. Comparison makes it restless.

    Take those four out.

    TD: (after a moment)

    And what is left is quiet.

    GyaniNani: Love itself has never been the noise. The noise is everything we attach to it.

    TD: So the threshing is real, but it is love acting on us. The stillness is love as it is in itself.

    GyaniNani: That is better than how I put it. Use yours.

    TD: Then perhaps love is not asking us to become better people.

    It is asking us to become available.

    GyaniNani: Available to be changed.

    TD: Yes.

    GyaniNani: (after a long pause)

    Which may be why he ends where he does.

    “Love possesses not nor would it be possessed. For love is sufficient unto love.”

    The moment we try to own it, we stop letting it change us.

    And a love that cannot change us has become a possession.

    TD: We began with me admitting I did not understand this chapter.

    GyaniNani: And we are ending with me admitting the same. I have read it for thirty years. It still gets ahead of me.

    Reflection

    Some things language can point to but never hand over.

    Love does not arrive as information. It arrives as weather — in the chest, in the stomach, in the hands.

    Every image Gibran uses for it is an image of something being broken open in order to become food.

    The alternative he offers is not a lesser love. It is a seasonless world.

    And the enemy is not hatred. It is fear.

    The question I am leaving with you:

    Where are you living in the seasonless world?

    One place in your life where you have chosen the safe version of love — over the one that would have cost you something. One sentence. No explanation needed.

    Last week I asked what you were calling a garment that was actually a skin.

    📖 From my copy

    A photograph of page 10 — the underlining, and in the margin, in pencil:

    “Fear is the enemy of love.”

    Until next Friday…

    Dialogue III — Two Shores, One Sea Everyone quotes one line from the chapter on marriage. I want to talk about a different one. And then, at last, about children.

  • 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-Part 4

    Violence, Fear, Perception and Agency

    Deepali Bhattacharya

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

    PART IV

    The Crowd That Watches

    “Violence is committed by one person. Helplessness is often created by many.”

    The video disturbed people for many reasons.

    But one detail returned repeatedly in conversations.

    “So many people were standing there.”

    “Why didn’t anyone intervene?”

    “Couldn’t someone have stopped it?”

    These questions arise almost every time footage of public violence emerges.

    We imagine ourselves inside the situation and instinctively believe we would have acted differently.

    Perhaps we would.

    Perhaps we would not.

    When I posed this question to TD, he introduced me to one of the most widely studied ideas in social psychology—the Bystander Effect. 9

    Developed through the work of psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley, the theory suggests something that appears counterintuitive.

    The more people witness an emergency, the less likely any one individual is to intervene.

    Responsibility becomes diluted.

    Each person unconsciously waits for someone else to act. Someone older. Someone stronger. Someone more qualified. Someone else.

    By the time everyone had waited, no one had moved.

    Understanding this does not excuse inaction.

    But it helps us understand it.

    Human behaviour under stress is rarely as simple as courage versus cowardice.

    Fear freezes.

    Confusion delays.

    Crowds look to one another for cues.

    If nobody moves, stillness itself begins to feel like the appropriate response.

    Yet the consequences extend far beyond the moment.

    For the victim, help does not arrive.

    For those watching later, another message is silently learnt.

    “If nobody helped them, would anyone help me?”

    This is where the psychological damage spreads.

    The violence lasts for minutes.

    The helplessness lasts much longer.

    As someone who has spent years listening to survivors of domestic violence, I have heard another version of the same story.

    “My neighbours knew.”

    “My relatives suspected.”

    “My colleagues noticed.”

    “But nobody asked.”

    Different setting.

    Different violence.

    The same silence.

    Sometimes people remain silent because they are afraid.

    Sometimes because they feel it is not their place.

    Sometimes because they genuinely do not know what to do.

    But from the perspective of the person experiencing violence, silence often feels indistinguishable from indifference.

    Perhaps that is why communities matter so much.

    Communities are not built merely by living close to one another.

    They are built when responsibility remains personal.

    When we stop assuming someone else will notice.

    Someone else will report.

    Someone else will intervene.

    Kindness begins long before heroism.

    It begins with paying attention.

    By asking if someone is alright.

    With refusing to dismiss obvious distress as “their personal matter.”

    Most acts of intervention will never appear in newspapers. 10

    But they may prevent tragedies that otherwise would.

    A QUESTION THAT STAYED WITH ME…

    If fear can stop us from acting, what helps us move again?

    Before we can answer that, perhaps we need to understand something fundamental.

    Fear itself is not our enemy.

    Notes:

    9.  The foundational experiments are Darley and Latáné (1968) and Latáné and Darley (1970) on diffusion of responsibility; Fischer et al. (2011) provide the definitive meta-analysis, confirming the effect while showing it weakens in genuinely dangerous emergencies.

    10.  There is hopeful evidence here: Philpot et al. (2020), analysing real CCTV footage of public conflicts across three countries, found that in roughly nine out of ten incidents at least one bystander — typically several — did intervene. Intervention, not apathy, is the statistical norm.

  • 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-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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