Picture this. It’s nine in the morning. Along the Trishuli river, the shops are opening as they do on any day; pilgrims are setting out for Kailash; labourers have begun the day’s shift on the hydroelectric projects strung along the water. Take one of them. A pilgrim of sixty, say, from a town in the plains, who finished the circuit of Kailash the day before and is being driven down towards the border this morning with the photographs still on his phone, feeling, as anyone would, that he has done something with his life. He is on the road at nine. It looks like one more ordinary morning. And then the mountain roars.

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of August, high above the Lhende river in Tibet, some twenty kilometres north of the Nepal border, a vast slab of ice and rock broke away from a glacier and fell into the river below, damming it. The water stopped, gathered, rose, and when enough of it had gathered it burst the wall it had made and came down all at once into Nepal’s Rasuwa district, carrying everything away: whole villages, the bridges, the roads, more than ten hydroelectric projects along the bank. Everything. The counting is still going on. Hundreds are confirmed dead, the count still rising, and more than a thousand are missing, their chances of being found alive thinning with every hour that passes; hundreds of the missing are foreign nationals, among them Indian, American, British and Australian pilgrims who had set out on the sacred road to Kailash. The mountain checked no one’s passport. Our pilgrim is on the list of the missing. That the toll ran so high is not the flood’s doing alone; it is also a measure of how much has been built in the water’s path, the settlements and dams and border posts crowded onto the banks of rivers that were long known to do exactly this. And it was not a monsoon flood, rain the ground could not absorb. It was the second kind of flood, the kind that no longer needs rain, and the kind that hardly any forecast will see coming.

And here is the part that the word “flood” hides. No rain had fallen that day. No cloud had burst. This disaster did not come down from the sky as water; it came down from the mountain as ice. The glacier broke, and a piece of it fell across the river. And why did the glacier break? Because the Himalayas are heating, and heat, applied to a great body of ice, breaks it. Rising heat weakens the ice and thaws the permafrost that holds the steep slopes together, so that avalanches, landslides and sudden lake bursts all grow more common. Whether warming pulled the trigger on this particular morning is a question the scientists will take months to settle. What is already settled is that warming loaded the gun and has been loading it for decades, and that is the cause, whatever the trigger.

And yet one can read through most of the coverage for a long time before meeting the single word that explains it. What one meets instead is a vocabulary built for not meeting it. “Cloudburst,” “natural calamity,” “freak event,” “unprecedented,” “the fury of nature,” “an act of god.” And, of the pilgrims, this: “God was so fond of them that He called them home.” It’s nauseating. Everything else is named, the bad luck, the lost pilgrims, the wrecked trade post, the sheer scale of the water; the one word that should not merely be spoken but shouted, climate, is the one being stepped around. A few reports have used it, and used it as one more item in the list, a label filed and forgotten; hardly anyone has asked what the word means, or whom it names. That avoidance is not an oversight. What kind of conspiracy is this, and whom is it meant to deceive? It is the first disaster and the deepest, the refusal to see what has already been seen, and written on every warning list, for years. In place of that one word, everything else is performed: politicians issue condolences, holy men send blessings and shed tears, reporters climb the wreckage to find a survivor to interview. The grief is real and deserves respect, but under cover of it the cause goes unnamed, while the next glacier is already straining. A reader who wants to do one thing today can audit the publications he pays for, and stop paying the ones that have no room for the word. If we would only stop talking, we might hear the ice cracking. And we would hear that it is cracking on no foreign map. It is cracking on the map we worship.

The Same River, Twice

And it was not the first time. This same small river had flooded in almost exactly this way fourteen months earlier, in the summer of 2025, when a glacial lake up in Tibet, swollen by a spell of high mountain heat, overflowed and drained without warning, killing nine people and taking out the bridge that joined the two countries. The year before that, in August 2024, two lakes burst above the village of Thame in the Everest region, emptying some four hundred and fifty-nine thousand cubic metres of water, about a hundred and eighty Olympic pools, and driving rock and water eighty kilometres down the valley, destroying twenty-five homes and displacing a hundred and thirty-five people. In September 2024, Nepal endured its heaviest rainfall since 1970, and more than three hundred people died. One small river. Fourteen months. Two catastrophes. This is not coincidence; it is a pattern. It is not a single episode; it is a process.

None of it was unforeseen, and that is the part that should be hardest to forgive. Five years ago ICIMOD, the region’s mountain-research institute, working with the United Nations, drew up an inventory of the glacial lakes most likely to burst into Nepal’s rivers, and found forty-seven of them dangerous: twenty-one inside Nepal, twenty-five across the border in Tibet, one in India. The corridor that flooded this week was named among them. Nepal has recorded twenty-six such outbursts since the late 1970s, in a sequence that runs back at least to a lake that destroyed a hydro station in 1985, and it now loses, on average, more than three hundred lives and over seventeen million dollars a year to natural disasters of every kind, and the share taken by ice and water is growing. One especially dangerous lake was drained to a safer level in 2016; the rest were left as they were. This flood did not fall on a place nobody was watching. It fell on a place that had been marked, on paper, in an official inventory, for years. Every one of those lakes should be drained, and draining them will buy years, not a cure; the lakes are only where the wanting has pooled.

It is worth understanding what warming actually does to a mountain, since the reports rarely say. Three things happen at once. The glaciers are thinning, and a thinning glacier does not melt tidily; it fractures, and no one can predict which of the range’s sixty thousand glaciers will shed a mass of ice next, or where it will fall, which is why more sensors and better forecasts, for all their use, will buy minutes and not decades; they can tell a village to run, they cannot tell the ice to hold. The permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that has cemented these young and still loose mountains for millennia, is thawing, so the slopes lose their glue and the rock begins to come away. And the snow that once fell and settled, banking water to be let out slowly through the dry months, now falls increasingly as rain, which does not settle but runs off at once, in a rush, as a flood.

The melting is not a matter of faith. In one Nepali valley, in the same district this flood destroyed, stands a glacier that has lost two-thirds of its mass since the 1970s and drawn back nearly eight hundred metres, and that is expected to be gone by the 2040s. Last year scientists, officials and Buddhist monks climbed above five thousand metres to hold a funeral for it, the first such ceremony for a glacier anywhere in Asia, and set a plaque in the rock recording the carbon in the air that month: 426 parts per million. Consider what that plaque is. It is not a measurement; the measurement is taken every day by machines that grieve for nothing. It is a confession, set in stone at the scene, by people who walked up to look at what they had done. In the whole of this story it is the one moment where the mountain and the human interior have been allowed to meet, and it took a funeral to arrange it.

The numbers behind the funeral are these. The Himalayas are warming faster than the plains below them, by somewhere between a third and three-quarters of a degree above the global rate, because thin high air heats more readily than thick low air; their ice is now vanishing about twice as fast as it was at the turn of the century, and some 65 per cent faster in the last full decade than in the one before, the mountains having shed as much as twenty-seven metres of ice thickness since the 1970s; and this past year brought the thinnest snow cover the region has seen in more than two decades. This is the Third Pole, the largest store of ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic, some sixty thousand glaciers holding around six thousand cubic kilometres of ice and feeding ten of the great river basins of Asia, barely a handful of them monitored to any international standard, and most of them expected to be gone before the century is out. Around two hundred glacial lakes across it are now rated dangerous, and the risk of them bursting is expected to keep climbing for another quarter of a century before it even peaks. A flood like this is a lifestyle disease. A heart attack does not arrive from nowhere on a particular Tuesday; it is the sudden, visible form of something that has been building, without symptoms, for thirty years. A flood that falls without rain is the same event, on the scale of a mountain range.

And the floods are only the loud half of what is coming. This is what glaciologists call peak water. For now the great rivers run full, fuller than in living memory, because the ice is melting faster than it can be replaced; but that fullness is borrowed against the future. These glaciers are the subcontinent’s oldest fixed deposit, laid down over ten thousand winters, and for a hundred centuries we have lived on the interest, the ordinary thaw of an ordinary summer. Now the deposit is being broken and poured into a current account, and for the first time we are spending not the interest but the principal itself. Around 2050 the flow fed by these glaciers is expected to crest and then begin to fall, a little less every year, so that the same rivers will swing between fiercer monsoon floods and drier, more desperate springs, and in time cease to be perennial at all, carrying only what the monsoon gives them; not even the holiest of them is exempt. On the present course, as much as eighty per cent of the region’s ice will be gone by 2100; even were the world to hold warming to the gentlest limit it has promised itself, a third of it would still go. Some two billion people downstream, and two hundred and forty million in the mountains themselves, will have to remake their lives around water that no longer keeps to a calendar, for more than four in every five of the springs that feed the high villages run on this snow and ice.

An Arm of the Ganga

And no one in India should imagine this is a neighbour’s tragedy. Look at the map. The stream that flooded is a headwater of the Trishuli, and the Trishuli feeds the Narayani, which crosses into India as the Gandak, runs down through Bihar, and pours into the Ganga a little above Patna. It is the same Gandak whose canals, drawn off at the Valmikinagar barrage on the border, water millions of acres of farmland in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. The water that came down as ruin in Rasuwa this week is, a little downstream and a little later, the irrigation of our fields and the aarti at our ghats. The pilgrims who died were walking India’s sacred geography, and that geography is the melting one: Kailash and Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath all stand on the same thawing ice. The map we worship and the map that is failing are one and the same. If any of it is still sacred to us, then the devotion the hour asks for is not to scale these mountains or to boast of having stood on them, but to save them, for the abode of the gods is turning, at a stunning pace, into barren and collapsing rock. It is the ice that holds these young mountains together; strip it away and they are not scenery but rubble in slow motion. What, then, would India be without the Himalayas?

The connection is not only one of maps. When a Himalayan glacier comes apart, the silt it carries settles in the riverbeds of the plains and raises them, and a shallower river brings a fiercer flood with every monsoon. Bihar is already the most flood-prone state in India, and most of its floods come down these very rivers from Nepal; the barrages on the border are opened, and within hours the water is in the fields of Champaran and Saran. In the forests of Chitwan and the Valmiki reserve that adjoins it across the line, gharials and Gangetic dolphins live in this same water. The Trishuli, in other words, is no foreign river. It is an arm of the Ganga. The wound cut into the Himalayas bleeds out across the plains below, the Indian plains. And still we treat these mountains as a fairground. Not the pilgrims, who walked; but the machinery we have built to carry the rest of us up there without walking: we widen the roads and cut the helipads and run the railways higher, inviting ever more traffic into the most fragile terrain on earth, and we call it development. Every road driven deeper into a thawing mountain is another wound in a body already bleeding. It is not development. It is the same demand, arriving now as a holiday.

So let the demand be met with a bill. The Himalayas are not a place for cheap tourism, and the first honest step is to say so at the toll gate: a steep entry fee on every road that climbs into them, and a heavy tax on every vehicle that does, heavy enough to be felt, not as punishment but as justice. Whoever goes up must pay the whole cost of going, and the whole cost includes what it costs the mountain. Instead the invitation is the other way round. Come, come, come, on the SUVs and the chartered buses; and if that is still inconvenient, we will cut the hills for helipads and run the railway to the top, for this is development. This is death.

Nor does the ice stop at any one border, because it was never divided the way the map is. One continuous body of Himalayan and Karakoram ice lies across Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, and it fails in each of them by the same mechanism, and after each failure the same thing is done. In October 2023 a lake above Sikkim gave way, destroyed a twelve-hundred-megawatt dam and killed more than fifty people; there was an inquiry, and a report, and a promise of sirens on the lakes. In 2021 a mass of rock and ice broke off a peak at Chamoli in Uttarakhand and killed around two hundred; there was an inquiry, and a report, and a fund. Bhutan lost twenty-one lives to a lake in 1994 and has spent thirty years lowering the ones beside it. Pakistan holds more than three thousand glacial lakes, thirty-three of them hazardous, with seven million people in their path, and has recorded more outbursts than any country on earth; the warning systems there are the best funded in the range. And the next one came anyway, each time, because the sirens and the reports and the funds were built to catch the water, and none of them was built to reach the heat. Worldwide, some fifteen million people now live within a few kilometres of a glacial lake, more than half of them in these mountains. Some of these places have already been struck; the rest are only waiting. A border on a map means nothing to meltwater.

The Cause That Is Not in the Mountain

Now put the question that no one is putting, the question that made this worth saying aloud. Who heated the glacier? Not the monsoon, which stayed away; not the mountain, which only held the ice. We did. Not the people of Nepal, who burned almost nothing, but all of us, the whole of humanity, and the way of living we have agreed to call normal. When something breaks in the outer world, the first tendency is to run outward for the cause, and to keep running, tracing the flood to the lake and the lake to the glacier and the glacier to a line rising on a graph, and at no point in that outward journey does the search turn round to look at the one conducting it. Outside, there are instruments; inside, there are none. We can measure a river to the centimetre and the air to a tenth of a degree, and about the desire that set the whole machine in motion we can say almost nothing, because no dial has been built for it and no satellite can be turned to face inward. A camera can show the mud and count the dead. It cannot photograph the wanting that warmed the ice, because that wanting is not in Tibet, or in the monsoon, or in the river. It is nearer than any of them, and much better hidden.

That wanting is not exotic, and it is not somebody else’s. The climate crisis is not, at bottom, a technical problem. It is a disorder in the ordinary human interior. We have been told, by school and market and screen and family alike, that we were born to consume, and that consuming will make us happy; that progress means owning more, and that a nation is to be ranked by how much it produces and consumes. So the emptiness inside is something we try to fill from the outside: one more car, one more house, one more holiday, one more thing bought and brought home. But the emptiness within is bottomless, and so the consumption must be bottomless too, and to consume without end some eight billion of us must burn the earth without end. Consumption is emission; between the two there is no gap at all. That burning is the temperature of the Himalayas. That temperature is what broke the ice. The difficulty is that the emissions are not attached to anything we hate. Everything that you love is carbon dioxide. Nobody loves CFCs, but you love the tea, and that is the problem. Trace the chain back and it does not break anywhere along its length: the emissions come from burning, the burning from the wish for energy, and the energy is spent on desires that do not fulfil us even when they are fulfilled. The engine is not the factory, and not the aeroplane. It is blind desire, the rush towards every object within reach that a person makes when he does not know who he is, and therefore does not know what he actually wants.

So the ice of the Himalayas, if the truth be told, is not melting in any factory’s furnace. It is melting in our tendencies, in the ego itself. It is the ego that is heating, and the ego that is scorching and melting everything it touches. The mountain is not taking revenge; it is only where the ice happened to be. That flood did not come from the cloud, and it did not finally come from the glacier. It came from the way we have been taught to see life.

This is the case I carried across Britain this year, to the Cambridge Union and to Oxford, to the London School of Economics and King’s College London, through the sessions of London Climate Action Week, and to the House of Lords: that every outer crisis has a centre, and the centre is the one who consumes, who has never once been asked to look at why he wants; and that no summit, treaty or efficiency gain will hold, because not one of them reaches him. I have put it to those audiences as a question about a drunk driver. When a man is drunk at the wheel, we do not sober him; we give him smoother roads, softer barriers, a faster ambulance, and call it safety. Our laws and our green technologies do the same, managing the wreckage of human desire without once touching the desire itself.

It is also why the arithmetic of the disaster is so obscene. Nepal is responsible for about a tenth of one per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases; a Nepali puts into the air, in a year, roughly half a tonne of carbon dioxide, an American about fourteen, a Chinese about eight, an Indian about two. The people this flood killed had burned almost nothing at all, and those who burned the most were nowhere near the water. The ones who are responsible will, almost without exception, get away with it. It will be, as it always is, the poor and the voiceless who are left to suffer, and to die. Carry that logic to its end and it reaches the creatures with no footprint at all, the animals and the forests, which have burned nothing and will lose everything. And yet the deepest flaw in the complaint, justified as every word of it is, is the belief that there are other people at all. Nature keeps no register of nationality; a sickness that begins in one city empties the streets of every city, and a molecule of carbon burned in one hemisphere warms the ice in the other. To speak of foreigners and their emissions is already to have forgotten that mankind is a single body, which is why the only sane answer to distant smoke is to raise the alarm wherever it rises, however impractical that sounds. Nor may India hold itself apart and reckon only what it is owed: our emissions are small per person, but our numbers are so vast that we now stand among the three largest emitters on earth, and the supply lines of the world would buckle if the two billion of us in this subcontinent reconsidered what we consume, and why.

And the deeper cruelty is that the many who drown do not even resent the few who profit; they line up to become them. We are worshipping our exploiters. The affluent whose lives we study and envy, the ones whose footprint is largest of all, are the very people writing the sentence; and we admire them for the scale of the claim on the earth that is killing us, having made that same claim the purpose of our own lives. We worship war in the same breath, and war is among the largest engines of this burning, though the emissions of no army are ever counted; we buy the tanks and the fighter jets from the very nations whose smoke is melting our ice, and pay them a profit for the privilege of warming the world a little faster. The demand that warms the ice is not forced on anyone at gunpoint; it is sold, and bought gladly, because when you manufacture a product, you also have to manufacture a buyer.

One ground alone lies beyond the reach of every government and every market, and it is the only ground from which that wanting could ever be withdrawn. Your interior is your own sovereign place. No power in the world has any right to your inner space.

That is where this flood was authored: in a few hundred crore private interiors that have signed their sovereignty away without noticing, each one certain it is merely living a normal life. A system is never more than the condensed tendencies of the individuals who compose it; there is no economy or market or civilisation apart from the wanting of ordinary people. That is the culprit no seismograph will record. It is the ego, the false sense of “I” that treats the earth as fuel for its own restlessness, that calls the burning progress, and that, when the fuel has done its work and the water is in the street, calls the flood an act of God.

And the consequence does not end at Rasuwa. For twenty years I have been saying, to anyone who would hear it, that beside this one question every other question is small, and the numbers have been public that whole time. Scientists now say we stand at the mouth of the sixth great extinction, and that of the five before it, three were driven by the very thing we are now manufacturing for ourselves, too much carbon dioxide in the air. What is new is not the mechanism. It is that for the first time in the history of the planet, a species is destroying its own habitat knowingly, with all the evidence laid out in front of it, the inventories drawn, the lakes numbered, the plaque set in the rock. Destruction in ignorance might be forgiven; destruction in full knowledge cannot. And the ones who did it will not be there for the reckoning. Those who emitted the most will die, comfortably, in the coming decades, and this burning debris called the planet will be left for the young to cope with. We have not only destroyed what we received from our ancestors; we have destroyed the future of our children, and we are hiding the fact from them. The range that trembled this week is the water tower of some two billion people; their drinking water and their crops come off that ice. For thousands of years the glaciers gave that water as life; they are beginning now to return it as death, because we have dealt death to them, and they do not vanish quietly but retreat with a bang. What Nepal and India heard this week was one of those bangs. There will be others. This is not one country’s flood. It is a trailer held up to the whole of mankind, a rehearsal of its own near future. We may be the last generation to live what we still call a normal life; within fifty years, perhaps within twenty or thirty, the earth may show us a ruin we cannot today imagine.

And there may be less time to choose than we like to tell ourselves. Warming does not travel in a straight line that a change of heart could simply stop; it moves through feedback loops, processes that, once set going, drive themselves. The plainest is written on the mountains. White ice throws the sun’s heat back into the sky, but where the ice melts, bare dark rock is left, and dark rock drinks the heat in, and that warmth melts more ice, which bares more rock, which draws down more heat, faster each year, like a ball let go on a slope. At least ten such loops are already turning. Even if every one of us mended our ways this morning, the planet would go on warming for a long time yet, and it is honest to say we may already be past the point of return. That is a reason neither for hope nor for despair, since both are ways of looking away. It is a reason to stop waiting for a cleverer technology or a firmer treaty to arrive and save us. And it is a reason that does not depend on the outcome. A man who sees his own wanting clearly does not stop consuming blindly because the planet can still be saved; he stops because he has seen. Whether the ice can be kept is not in his hands. Whether he goes on burning without knowing why is.

So the answer, too, is not outside but within, because that is where the crisis began. The climate is already exploding, and the ice already loosened will melt for a long while yet, whatever is resolved in any capital; no scheme and no summit has ever reached the one who wants. Until a human being knows himself, he will go on devouring the earth, and we have very nearly devoured it. Green technologies are necessary and policies are necessary, but they are not sufficient, and alone they will fail. You cannot cure a disease by treating it where it is not; work on the symptom alone and the symptom returns, because the sickness was never in the symptom. The sickness is in the wanting, and the wanting is not on any mountain. The only measure equal to the cause is a mass education of the self. Self-knowledge is the last environmentalism, and in truth the only one, for a person who has seen what he is not has seen through his wanting as well; he learns what no purchase will ever give him, and then he no longer consumes blindly, and the emissions fall of their own accord. Ask what a sane relationship with the earth would look like, and the honest reply is that it cannot be drawn up in advance. There can be no definition. The moment we premeditate it, we kill it. All that can be done is to hold up a light, and then leave the rest to the person. Seeing, by itself, changes nothing; it is only the point at which change first becomes possible, and it is the one labour no one can perform in another’s place. The way out is the way in.

Can we reconsider the way we live? Or we can let the Himalayas do it for us.

That flood was not a piece of news. It was a mirror. Nature is holding it up to us again and again, and breaking the mirror will not change the face in it. Our pilgrim was carrying that mirror in his pocket when the water took him, in a photograph of himself standing on the ice, as any of us would have taken; so is every one of us. The only question left is whether we still have the courage, and the honesty, to look, and to see that the face is our own.

Acharya Prashant asks the question no one wants to ask: who heated the glacier first? Not someone else. Us. Not only Nepal. The entire humanity. Our vision of life. Our wrong principles of living.

Actual act of Dharma today would be to save the Himalayas, not to scale them, not to climb them, not to simply remain an onlooker as they are being actively destroyed due to climate change, which is brought upon by human beings’ actions.

This short clip was taken from the Q&A portion of the Live Gita session which took place on 27th August 2026.

Acharya Prashant emphasized again, as he has been doing since the last 2 decades that Climate Change cannot be solved merely at the level of technological advancements and policy making.

Climate change doesn’t adhere to international borders, the emissions due to the consumption levels of those in the Western world, have been and are continuing to cause catastorphies in South Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, India.

‘Mass based education of the self’ is desperately needed.

Look at him on the road to Parliament. Twenty-two, hoarse from sloganeering, phone held high, live streaming his defiance to the nation, background music perfectly chosen. The country has decided he is a revolution.

Now look at the same phone an hour later, on the bus home. The astrology app is open, because a job interview is coming and the stars must be consulted. There are three messages from his mother about a girl his parents have shortlisted; he will oblige his mother. There is an EMI reminder for the phone itself, which he bought on credit he does not really have. And there is the spicy reel he is watching to recover from the protest, served to him by a machine that knows him better than he knows himself.

The youngster screaming at the police on Instagram, and the youngster enquiring how to enchant a reluctant girl on an astro app: both screens are real. The country has chosen to see only the first one and has begun garlanding it. I have spent more than twenty years looking at the second one, and I am writing this to say: withdraw the garland. The garland is the surest way to make certain the young man never changes.

Every generation is certain that the next one is more rebellious. Hardly anyone stops to ask: rebellious against what, and from where. The one doing the rebelling has himself been assembled, by the school, the media, peer pressure, religion, society and culture, all of them stamping themselves on him. What they have produced is a type. We even have a name for the type. We call it Gen Z. Whether anything beneath a new name and a new type has changed is a separate question, and one that is not entertaining enough to be asked.

Notice, before anything else, where the name itself came from. Nobody in this generation chose it. “Gen Z” was popularised by marketers and demographers, the people whose job is to slice the population into cohorts so that each cohort can be sold to more efficiently. It is a shelf label, the kind pasted on a product category. A generation that wears its price sticker as its identity has already told you something about its condition.

How many of the Gen Zs are actually there in India? Around forty crore between the ages of fourteen and twenty-nine, the largest such population on earth. Three out of every ten eligible voters are between eighteen and twenty-nine. In Bihar it is closer to four in ten. In the seven states going to the polls next year it is about twenty-two per cent. By 2029, this generation overtakes the millennials as the largest voting bloc in the country.

Every political party is on reels now. Men who have probably never opened a laptop are doing Instagram live sessions, showing you their dogs, wearing sneakers. So it has been decided. The youth have woken up. They will now decide elections. A generational shift has arrived.

I do not think anything has arrived.

What is being called a generational shift is a momentary situational phenomenon, and everybody has mistaken it, the celebrating and the nervous alike, including the political parties. This badge of honour is being awarded far too quickly. They are rebels, we say. But are they really?

Let me say where I speak from, because it matters. I am not reading this generation from a corporate or academic survey. For over two decades my daily work has been with the young, not at rallies and not through a screen alone, but in direct and intimate question and answer, one person at a time, in lakhs across the years. My work has been to go after their weaknesses, which means I have had to know those weaknesses very closely. The second screen is my workplace. What I am about to say, I have heard from their own mouths, day after day.

Where the queue stands

Leave the placards aside and look at where this generation actually stands in line.

The astrology app market in India was worth around fourteen hundred crore rupees in 2024 and is projected to grow tenfold by 2030, at close to fifty per cent a year. There are now more than nine hundred religious technology startups in the country. The largest player in the category booked over twelve hundred crore rupees last financial year, up eighty-five per cent, with crores of registered users and more than thirteen thousand astrologers waiting at the other end of a chat window. The investors have a name for the sector. They call it faith tech.

Who is paying for it? By the industry’s own account, the young. Eighty-five per cent of the users of these platforms are under thirty-five. The market for superstition in this country is being sponsored by the generation that calls itself forward-looking. Yes, superstitious rather than rebellious is a word that better applies here. And a person who cannot even beat imaginary stories will not stand up to a living oppressor.

Show one of them an old village woman, unlettered, tying a thread around a tree for some wish of hers, and watch the laughter. They will say she is backward. “Aunty got no chill!”

Then look at what the one laughing keeps on his own phone. The crystals, the tarot, the aura, the vibes, the chakras, the manifestation, the reiki, the past life regression, the akashic records. He has not shed the superstition. He has anglicised it. He has made it cool, made it tech-savvy, put it on a subscription. And that old woman had a defence he does not have, because she got no schooling, no exposure, no internet, nothing at all. He got everything. What is his excuse?

Instagram is the homeground of Gen Z, we say. Then how do you account for the fact that the babas of today are bigger on Instagram than even on Facebook? The most followed of them carries over a crore on Instagram and under ten lakh on Facebook. Facebook in this country is where the oldies sit. Instagram is where their children are. So look again at that gap and ask whose devotion is actually being counted. The fame was made by reels, then multiplied by cricketers and film stars arriving to touch the feet, all these, by the way, being Gen Z icons. This is not an inherited devotion carried on out of habit by the elderly. The young have chosen to be in the queue. Those queuing up before authority of one kind cannot challenge authority of another kind.

Every Saawan the highways fill with the barefoot ones carrying water. Stand by the road and look at the faces. You will not find many grandfathers there. Who are they? Gen Z.

Ask the young what they want from a working life, and the Lokniti-CSDS youth surveys have been consistent: more than half say a government job, against a quarter who want to build something of their own. They want security, not risk. Nearly four in five describe themselves as religious, and six in ten want a film banned if it hurts religious sentiment.

Then there is marriage, which is where you find out what a person actually believes. Eighty-four per cent of married youth in this country had an arranged marriage. Six per cent had a love marriage. More than nine in ten of the arranged ones were within caste, and the actual incidence of inter-caste marriage is about five per cent. Among the unmarried, half want their parents to choose the partner. The charts are matched before anything is settled, and somebody’s life gets cancelled because two pieces of paper did not agree.

And then there is dowry. The World Bank looked at forty thousand rural marriages across five decades and found dowry paid in ninety-five per cent of them, with the amount remarkably stable the whole way through. And it is not only a village thing either. It is not a poor man’s thing. It is not even a Hindu thing. Kerala, the most literate state in the country, records the highest average dowry of all, and thousands of women a year die over it. A hundred years of modern education in this country, and it has not touched this at all.

The one who wants the safe government posting, the one shouting the sectarian slogan, the one waiting for his parents to find him a wife, the one collecting a dowry, the one who will not leave his caste for anything, all of these are as young as the ones on the road to Parliament. Often they are the same ones.

Rebellion from such a segment is just another entertainment for a bored, conditioned self.

What they ask when nobody is filming

The placard is the public face. I have spent twenty years with the private one, and the two do not match.

The questions that come to me daily, in lakhs over the years, are not about transforming the system. They are these:

My parents want me married, what do I do? There is someone I love, but the caste is different. How do I tell my father? Should I leave my job? I am afraid. How do I stop scrolling? How do I wake up on time? How do I concentrate for even one hour? I failed an exam and I cannot face my family. My girlfriend’s kundli did not match. I want to do something meaningful but my parents will not allow it, and I cannot go against them.

Read that list again. A generation whose most urgent private question is how to gather the courage to speak to its own father is being publicly garlanded as the force that will confront the State. The one who cannot cross his family’s threshold is being told he will cross the establishment! The gap between the private question and the public image is this entire article in one line.

And what feeds the inner life of this generation? Not the book. India’s own Time Use Survey found that barely four per cent of Indians now read anything for pleasure, down from five and a half per cent just five years earlier, and the analysts are unanimous about where the hours went: to the reel. As for ripeness, the ASER surveys of rural fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds, the very cohort being crowned, found a quarter unable to read a Class 2 text fluently in their own language and more than half unable to divide a three-digit number by a single digit. Every revolution in history was led by its most intensely educated young minds, self-educated where the schools failed them, reading banned books by lamplight. Show me the lamplight here.

And then there is love, the oldest school of intensity. A revolutionary is first a lover; the two run on the same fuel, the capacity to stake everything on one thing. Measure this generation there. Six per cent love marriages, we saw. And in the dating world it has built for itself, its own apps publish a running glossary for the ways of neither loving nor leaving: the situationship, the ghosting, the breadcrumbing, the benching, and now what the surveys call dial-toning, which more than half of young daters admit to, keeping someone on a low flame with an emoji a week, commitment withheld, exit withheld. Whether the partner is chosen by the parents or kept pending on an app, the common factor is that nothing is staked. And the heart that will not burn for a beloved is not about to burn for a nation.

And the dependence is not only emotional. Below thirty, the overwhelming majority are living on their parents, financially and otherwise. Even in the West, where the entire culture is built on leaving home at eighteen, seventy-two per cent of the young say they could not support themselves without their parents. Here, where the young adult lives inside the family’s money and the family’s approval, nobody should pretend the figure is smaller. And where the money is their own, look at what is happening to it. Four out of ten first-time borrowers in the country are now from this generation, and the credit bureaus say so with pride. The loans are not for building anything. Personal loans make up the largest share of their borrowing, and the industry’s own study found that loans taken for phones and gadgets rose from one per cent of the total to thirty-seven per cent in four years, while loans for medical emergencies fell. In the first half of one financial year, close to a lakh crore rupees moved through buy-now-pay-later apps. A generation that cannot wait for a phone is being described as the generation that will patiently rebuild a nation.

Then the phone itself. The young Indian gives it upwards of six hours a day by most measures, the highest of any generation, checking it dozens of times before lunch. Understand what this means. The conditioning of every earlier generation came from the village, the school, the temple, the family, all of them slow and general. This is the first generation whose conditioning is personalised, profiled, and fed back to it minute by minute by a machine that has studied it individually. Even its rebellion now arrives as recommended content. The protest reel monetises. Dissent is a genre, sitting in the feed between the cooking video and the astrology ad. The one genuinely new thing about this generation is not its awakening. It is that its sleep has a better delivery mechanism.

And the fragility has been measured, though I did not need the measurement. A Sapien Labs study across eighty-four countries scored young Indians between eighteen and thirty-four at the bottom of its index of mental functioning, while Indians over fifty-five, in the same country at the same moment, scored at fully healthy levels. Anxiety disorders in India have risen by over a hundred per cent since 1990, by The Lancet’s accounting. And the darkest number of all: by NCRB’s count, more than fourteen thousand students died by suicide in a single recent year, over a lakh in the past decade, with failure in an examination recorded as the cause in around two thousand cases a year. One result, one rejection, and a young person’s entire sense of worth comes down. I say this with no distance at all. These are the faces that sit in front of me. I have watched a single harsh word send a young person home for a week. I have watched them seek a blessing when what they came for was an answer. This is not the raw material of a revolution. This is the raw material of my daily work, and the work is to remove exactly this.

Let it be said plainly: I am describing the type, not sentencing every individual. The individual is precisely the one this article wants to rescue from the type. But the type stands thus. Half educated by the market’s own measure, with fewer than half of graduates found employable by their own recruiters. Fully superstitious, with the apps to prove it. Living on their parents and calling it independence. Borrowing for gadgets and calling it freedom. Scrolling eight hours and calling it awareness. So dependent on approval that one result can shatter the whole structure. This is what is being garlanded as a generational awakening.

Nobody knows what to rebel against

The coronation, mind you, did not begin on the street. For years now, every boardroom has had its Gen Z deck, every HR department its Gen Z sensitisation workshop, every campus its seminar on teaching the “unprecedented generation”, all resting on the same premise: something special has arrived, and the world must adjust to it. Then, this summer, the premise appeared to find its proof. A satirical Instagram page, born of a judge’s unflattering entomology about the jobless young, swelled within days into one of the largest followings on Indian social media and then a march on Parliament over leaked papers, and a Union minister’s chair was duly vacated. The coronation was declared complete: the special generation had acted at last.

So it is worth asking soberly: what was that crowd?

A general sense of victimisation and excitement, free time, entertainment, and free food will move a section of the youth out of the house and into an assembly; people gathering somewhere is not a generation waking up. So look instead at what the movement asked for. The crowd wanted one minister to go. He went, and the same day the agitation was called off. The education system that exists for the sake of “placements” stands exactly where it stood; the social system that settles a young person’s worth by a rank, and pressures him even into suicide, stands exactly where it stood. A movement against a system does not dissolve on the day a single man resigns. A movement against a man does. And the page behind it, set up by professionals and adopted within weeks by the student wings of the established parties, was spontaneous in appearance only.

The grievance itself was legitimate: the queues for institutions and government jobs are long, and somebody breaking a queue is a fraud, and fraud deserves anger. But go one level deeper, because I have, over the decades, heard what these aspirants actually want, endlessly, in their own words. The anger was not against the queue. The anger was for the queue. The protester’s grievance was that he had been cheated of his fair place in the line for a government job. His dream, stated plainly, is that the system should function honestly so that his rank may be secure. A rebellion whose maximum demand is better admission into the machine is not a rebellion against the machine. It is the machine’s own quality-control department, staffed free of cost. And this is no comment on one summer’s march. It is the standing pattern of this land: every few years the young erupt over a leak, a paper, a recruitment, and every eruption ends where it began, at the head of the same queue.

And the courage? Somebody abused a man in authority on camera, and the country decided it was watching a rebel. Abusing authority is not rebellion. Instead of rebels, what we rather have here are the cultural offspring of the abusive roast channels with audiences in crores. For a decade, youtubers and roasters and even some standups have taught the young that contempt is wit, that the cruellest line wins the room, and that a man will sit there and be humiliated if the money is good. The harvest of that abusive online culture has come in, and it is being mistakenly called dissent. And the moment somebody threatens back, the apology arrives very quickly. The same young man who will not tell his father about his girlfriend is surely not going to tell the State anything it does not want to hear, not once the cameras are gone.

It is cool to be rebellious. Not that anybody knows what he must rebel against. Rebellion here is a mood one puts on, an aesthetic, what they themselves would call a vibe. And a vibe does not make a revolution. A vibe lifts when the weather changes. A revolution is what remains when the weather turns against you, and the weather turned the day one minister resigned.

I am not unsympathetic in saying this. One feels suffocated, and one wants to react, and this generation is disgruntled and looking for an outlet. The inheritance is unjust. Climate change, the wars, the accumulated nonsense of everybody who came before, all of it lands on them, and none of it was their doing. My quarrel is not with people who happen to be twenty-three. Two decades of my life say otherwise. My quarrel is with the celebration being conducted over their heads.

Understand what the celebration actually does. A doctor who spends his life treating patients does not insult them when he refuses to call the disease health. But the one who garlands the patient and declares him a champion has done him real harm, because the patient now has a reason never to enter the clinic. That is what this euphoria is. It is not a harmless exaggeration. It is theft. It steals from the young the one thing that could actually help them, which is the knowledge that the work remains undone. Tell a conditioned young person that he is already a revolutionary, and you have sealed the conditioning shut and decorated the lid. Praise is the sedative here, and it is being administered by everyone with something to gain from a sleeping patient: the parties who want the vote, the platforms who want the watch-time, the brands who invented the label in the first place.

Same centre

Nothing changes because the generation has changed. It needs something else.

Something is wrong with the mechanics of a fan, and it is making a noise. The noise is what disturbs you, so you take a gun and shoot at the noise. And the noise seems to be coming from everywhere, so you fire in every direction. You never look at the fan, because you never studied mechanics.

Even that example is too kind, because the fan at least sits outside you. The machine making all this noise is situated within. The noise arises here, reflects off there, returns, and you stand firing in all directions convinced the culprit is somewhere out there.

There is a name for the one operating that machine: ahankaar, the ego. The ego is the first superstition. So long as there is an I here that must be secured at any cost, everything else follows without anybody having to sell anything.

There is a restlessness inside that gets felt and never understood. Feeling a thing and understanding a thing are not the same, in the way you feel the pain in your stomach without knowing what is causing it. So the running starts, and it runs outward. Whatever is out there gets made enormous, because it is now going to save me. And whatever has been made enormous has to be controlled. That is the whole business, and it has nothing to do with faith. It is the ego’s compulsion to make a random universe deterministic.

The ego is not afraid of revolutions. It steps into revolutions very happily. It is afraid of reality. And when it announces that somebody out there is the problem, that too is an arrangement for keeping attention away from itself. This is not about one individual. It is about the blind collective that every one of us takes part in.

You can bring down one system and receive a brand new institution the next morning from the same centre. Change of generation changes nothing. Change of centre is everything. Rebellion that comes out of conditioning is not freedom at all.

In Iran in 1979, women were at the front of the movement that threw the Shah out, and when the Islamists took over, those same women were put inside the veil. So what had changed? Russia had its revolution in 1917, and not long afterwards it was handed one of the bloodiest dictators history has seen.

Temple scandals have broken before, in numbers, and watch how little moves each time. There is always an identity waiting to be protected at the end of it. The guru falls, but the follower does not. The failing may be entirely our own, but we will not embrace the outsider over our own. Unless education throws light on that identity itself, on the one who demands to belong somewhere, the flag simply changes hands, and the chest that swells is the same chest.

Time is the pretence of change, a promise that is never kept. Generations come, and generations go, in the same darkness. Without education of the self, it is wishful thinking to expect that a new generation will bring anything with it. The curtain falls, the curtain rises. The characters change, the costumes change, the theme of the play does not. The primitive power of collective darkness will not be challenged by soda water bubbles.

And this is what I am afraid the masses will do. They will follow. A generation that hands its marriage to its parents and its future to an astrologer is not going to withhold itself from the next man who arrives with a face and a slogan. The queue will form, exactly as it forms for the charts and the threads and the free first consultation. As long as the inner condition remains untouched, the outcomes will keep matching the condition.

There has been such a thing as a young rebel in this country, and it is worth remembering what he looked like. He sat in a colonial jail at twenty-three, reading, writing, turning his attack first upon his own inherited certainties, his own religion, his own conditioning, before he turned it on any government. Rebellion, where it has ever been real, has begun as an assault on one’s own falseness. It has never begun with a reel.

Education of the self, and not the kind available in schools and colleges, that is the only revolution there is. My twenty years with the young have been spent on nothing else, and this is precisely why I refuse to flatter them. Nobody is condemned by the year of his birth. Nobody is rescued by it either.

And now, to you

My young friends, everything above was said about you. Let me now say something to you.

I am being blunt because I am your well-wisher, not your enemy. Somebody who has given twenty years to sitting with you cannot be your enemy. The ones celebrating you have known you for one news cycle. I have known you long enough to have watched you cry. They hear your loud slogans, I have heard your silent wails.

I know your restlessness is real. That thing in your chest at two in the morning that no reel can settle, that is not a disorder and not a phase. It is the truest thing about you. My complaint has never been that you feel it. My complaint is only with where you have been taught to fire from it: at the minister, at the system, at the parents, at everything except the place it actually comes from.

So do not accept those coming to garland you. When they tell you that you are the awakened generation, understand that you are being paid a wage to stay asleep. Flattery is the cheapest salary ever invented, and everyone offering it wants something from you: your vote, your watch-time, your money on an EMI. The one who tells you the work is still ahead of you is the only one who has brought you a gift.

And do not wait for the great occasion. The revolution you are capable of is not on the road to Parliament. It is nearer and it is harder. It is telling your father the truth this evening. It is deleting the app you consult before you dare to live. It is sitting for one hour with a book that was written to shake you, instead of a feed that was written to keep you. It is asking, when the anger rises, one question before you fire: who exactly is burning in here, and what is he trying to save?

Ask that question and stay with it, because feeling the restlessness is not the same as understanding it, and a moment of clarity will not be enough. You will see your own falseness clearly on a Tuesday and be back inside it by Friday, unless the seeing is joined by the intent to be free of what you have seen. That intent is the only thing in this world that is entirely yours to give. Nobody can supply it, nobody can steal it, and no astrologer can predict it.

You have been cheated, yes, but not in the way the slogans say. The exam leaks and the rest are the small cheating. The big cheating is that in all your years of education, nobody ever turned your attention toward the one doing all the wanting, the fearing, the scrolling, and nobody told you that this one is a bundle of borrowed things, and that there is a way to look at that bundle and be free of it. That education was your birthright, and it was withheld. Go get it. It does not require a college, a movement, or a generation. It requires one honest person, and you are allowed to be the first one you meet.

So drop the tag. It was never your name; it was a label printed by people who wanted to sell you something, and everyone since has used it for the same purpose. You are not Gen Z or any fancy thing. You are not special, and hear that as the liberation it is, because the one who is not special has nothing left to defend. The work is the work it has always been. Your birth year does not excuse you from it, and it does not disqualify you from it either.

It is open. It has always been open. Come.

Another fifteenth of August came and went. The tricolour was up on every gate and lapel, the anthem played in the schools by mid-morning, and from the panchayat to the Red Fort the speeches rang out. The feeling was real; a people has every right to mark the day it stopped being ruled.

And yet, even in the middle of this, one question tends to get buried every year, and it is worth raising precisely on this day.

India, or any other country in the world, at the moment of its founding, what is its condition, free or subjugated? Look closer. Take a single human being. What is his default, freedom or captivity? No human being is born anyone’s slave. Nobody is born into bondage; it is always put on afterwards. And no one was ever taught to want freedom; that wanting is already in place at birth.

An animal in the forest is free, a bird in the sky is free. You catch the bird and put it in a cage; only then is it subjugated. Subjugation has to be manufactured; nothing is born into it. A nation is no different, and its natural condition too is freedom. The demand for freedom is not one demand among many; it is the deepest, and the first. What liberation is to a person, freedom is to a nation.

So what India celebrates on Independence Day begins to look a little strange. Freedom is the given; the more honest and more useful question is this: if everything is born free, where did bondage enter later? Was India always enslaved? No. Then where did the slavery come from? That is the question worth asking.

This is why I would want Independence Day observed as a day of self-examination. Eat the sweets of freedom, by all means, but first ask how the bondage arrived, and whether it has truly left, or whether it still hangs over the country like a sword.

A Thousand-Year Anomaly

This slavery is not a matter of ten or twenty or fifty years: nearly a thousand years, sometimes a part of the land, sometimes the whole of it, under someone else’s dominion. Whoever could come, came. From Europe the Portuguese came, the French came, the Dutch came, the British came; the only ones who did not come were those who could not, for reasons of geography. From nearby came the Afghans, the Iranians, the Turks, the Arabs. And mark something older still: when the Shakas and the Hunas came, centuries before this thousand years began, they were repelled or absorbed; Skandagupta broke the Hunas at the gates. There was a time when this land could answer an invasion. What changed after the turn of the millennium is that the defeats stopped being exceptions and became the rule. That change is the thing that must be explained.

Even while the British were installed, the Japanese dropped bombs on Madras itself, and more heavily on Vizag and Kakinada up the coast; the threat from the Andamans and Burma is well documented too. The Axis powers had already drawn their line through the subcontinent, the German sphere to its west, the Japanese to its east; the division of India was settled in Berlin and Tokyo before India had any say in it. And after independence, China walked into the borders and carried off land.

Something that happens once, or twice, you may call an accident. Something that continues for a thousand years, is that still an accident, or is there some deep structure behind it? People from so many different directions, of so many different nationalities, came again and again and defeated this land again and again; this cannot be merely a matter of others’ cunning. Behind it lies a structural cause, an internal weakness, that has kept forcing the country into the position of prey.

And the larger question is this: a cause that persisted for a thousand years and kept the country enslaved, would it have vanished completely in seventy-five or eighty years? Not even a hundred years have passed since 1947. A thing that can hold for a thousand years, how would it disappear so quickly? If it is still present, then the danger is still equal to what it was; the sword is still overhead.

It is comforting to say that the British came, that Indians were simple, innocent people, and that outsiders sowed division and ruled. But division cannot be sown so easily. Where there is truth, where there is love, where there is dharma, division does not go in with such convenience.

The battle of Plassey was won by open bribery. It is not counted as a battle won but as a battle bought; the British, as has been said, bought the battle of Plassey. Where a man sells his conscience, his dharma, his country’s interest for a bribe, the division did not come from outside; it was already sitting inside. At Buxar, three Indian rulers stood together against the British, and yet the self-interest, the mutual suspicion, the friction among them ran so deep that they could not truly become one. Each was watching his own advantage; none had any concern for nation, for dharma, for truth. The British defeated them again, and India still says they won by dividing. The truth is that where the selfish ego of lokdharma sits, sowing division is very easy for any outsider.

And let it be said plainly, because it must be said before what follows: this is not the complaint of an outsider. This land produced the Upanishads; it asked, before anyone else asked, who the asker is. Somewhere in its air there is still the memory of rishis who feared no question and worshipped no fear. The grief is exactly this, that a civilisation that once stood at the very summit of self-inquiry chose, somewhere along the way, the comfort of ritual over the fire of the question. No one grieves for what he does not love. What follows here is grief, not contempt.

So what is that cause? Political it cannot be; no political cause lasts this long. Coincidence it cannot be; that much is settled. The cause is cultural, something that has, by misfortune, dissolved into the air of India and settled there as culture, something held sacred and clung to.

I call it lokdharma, the folk-religion. Lokdharma is no external power; it is one’s own ego, hardened into rite, tradition, custom and fantasy. It is the structure that merely looks like dharma, resting on Smriti texts severed from Shruti, on the Puranas and on ritual, while the real dharma, the Shruti-dharma of the Upanishads, of Advaita, of truth and freedom, stays far away. In the Sanatana order the rule is plain, that of the Smriti texts only what agrees with Shruti is to be accepted, and whatever does not agree with Shruti must be rejected. Lokdharma is ignorant of Shruti; it has taken the Puranas, the ladder of caste, ritual and folk-belief as the final truth. Where the very root of a religion lies in fantasy and fear, what price will fact carry there, or the question, or free thought?

Those who count the centuries of slavery most loudly are very often the most devoted guardians of the very lokdharma that caused it. They will avenge the invader and worship the weakness that invited him. Counting the years is easy; questioning the muhurat, the caste ladder and the horoscope is what nobody’s pride permits.

The caste order made the sword the birthright of one caste and the duty of none. You sweep, you scrub the vessels, you cut hair, you plough the field; the sword is not your dharma. Men from every caste did fight, whenever armies needed them, but the society never told them that the defence of the land was their own sacred charge. Fighting remained an employment for most and a birthright for a few; it became a dharma for almost no one. A land where defence is a caste occupation rather than a common duty will always be defended by hirelings, and hirelings can be bought. Plassey showed what hirelings cost. And when most of a population has been shut out of ever becoming a soldier, a scientist, a policy-maker by right, where will an army find its most able people? Where there is no order built on merit, how will the strength of a nation ever take hold?

India says Krishna is its ideal. To hold someone as an ideal means living as he lived, understanding what he said, accepting it, bringing it into life. Had that been true, the Gita would already have entered the country’s life. The Gita was spoken on the field of war, exactly where the choice stands between life and death, victory and defeat, throne and empire. The Gita says yuddhasva, fight. No anxiety about winning or losing, no concern for the throne, but do what is right, and do it without craving the fruit; struggle for dharma without a thought for the result.

One who had truly lived the Gita, how would he go soft so easily in battle? He would say, I can die, but I will not accept defeat; I will not let a handful of men settle over me. But this can only be said when dharma is present within. Suffering is not the disgrace; every people suffers. The disgrace is to stop resisting, for as long as a man resists, something in him has still not consented to his chains. India’s failure was not that it suffered for a thousand years but that, again and again, it made peace with the suffering, found a muhurat for it, found a ritual for it, found a fatalism for it. India accepted defeat so easily because, in its heart, it knew that dharma was in any case absent from its life.

India is not a religious country; it is a folk-religious country. It accepted fear, superstition, division and self-interest in the name of dharma, and so it felt no hesitation in accepting its own defeat. This is the dishonesty within, the one that turns its face from fact and is afraid of the question.

Lokdharma, Knowledge, and the New Slavery

In the age when the powers of Europe were working out their exact position at sea, what was India doing? To know your place on the ocean you need both latitude and longitude. Latitude could be had with reasonable skill and simple instruments; longitude could not, and without it you simply did not know where you were. To solve this they researched for years, lost lives, and at last built the instrument that could give true longitude at sea, the fruit of the labour of laboratories like Greenwich. That same instrument helped carry them all the way to India. While they were racing ahead in astronomy, India was tangled in the auspicious hour, in bells and gongs, and is tangled there still. The world moves ahead in science; this country moves ahead in casting horoscopes. This is the very astrology that pushed India back; had India attended to astronomy, its defensive strength at sea and on land would have been something else.

In this same period Europe had its Renaissance, a renaissance of the freedom of thought. Universities were opening there, grants for research were growing, new technologies were being made. Here the public’s money went mostly into tombs, minarets, grand temples and ritual. How many new universities appeared over the last eight or ten centuries, how many research institutions, is itself a question worth asking. Recall the dates. Bologna was teaching by 1088, Oxford by 1096; Nalanda was burnt around 1193, and for seven hundred years nothing rose in its place. The invader lit the fire once; the not-rebuilding, century after century, was India’s own doing. And the habit persists: even today India spends barely 0.84 per cent of its GDP on research, against China’s 2.6 and South Korea’s five and more.

The guns, the ships, the vehicles, the trigonometry, the cartography of the European powers were all far ahead of the technology here. The intelligence of Indians is not less; it is that lokdharma sits on top of that intelligence. The money went into ritual, offering and display instead of into universities, laboratories and research. Where knowledge is not valued, what will arrive if not slavery?

You will have heard one name, Macaulay, from the time of the British. He made a jibe whose sting is still felt. He said that in the languages of this country there were, by his account, no books on any subject that deserved to be compared with Europe’s own. He laughed at the astronomy here, saying it would move laughter in the girls of an English boarding school. At its medicine he sneered that its doctrines would disgrace an English farrier, a blacksmith. At the geography he mocked that it was made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

He was insulting, and he had been handed the right to insult. Can it be denied that Indians had brought this ruin on themselves, and that this is why an outsider earned the right to mock? Macaulay said girls on purpose, to show that in England even girls study enough to know more than the great pandits and vaidyas here. And even today the new generation, men and women alike, goes to horoscope apps on their phones to have their charts cast. The rate at which women take part in India’s workforce remains far below China’s, and in the cities, where no field or farm can serve as the excuse, barely one urban woman in five is in the workforce at all. In China women step out to work, to build a nation; here a great many women are shut inside the kitchen and the bedroom, occupied with building families rather than building the nation. When you keep half a country’s citizens under house-arrest and another nation sends all its women and men into the field, who pulls ahead is not hard to guess. Macaulay did not die; Macaulay is alive even now. He mocks this country in a thousand ways to this day, and that right, sadly, was handed to him by Indians themselves.

It is not as if slavery happens only by seizing land. Earlier the way was this, that to enslave someone you marched onto his land and seized his sovereignty. Today a society can be made subordinate through the drain of wealth, through deals, trade treaties, outsourcing and the inequality of knowledge and technology. When India was politically subject, the drain of wealth is well known. Today there is no political subjection, yet the drain of wealth continues, quite formally, through agreements and deals. The Global North is many times richer in per-capita terms; the dirty, polluting part of production often happens in the Global South. The emissions that Europe’s factories and services show do not include the emissions they have had produced elsewhere. Add those, and Europe’s true footprint swells well beyond what its ledgers admit; in some of its countries, half or more of the consumption footprint is generated on someone else’s soil. The dirty work is done by other countries, the smoke and the pollution borne there, and the clean goods used by the citizens of Europe. This is the new kind of slavery.

Earlier, slaves were carried in ships in chains. Today you stand in line at an embassy for a visa and present yourself as a servant: the slave is here, my master, tell me what service to do. You drive a taxi in their economy and do the low-level work, while they do the high-end work, the research, the new technology, and create new knowledge. The dishes are scrubbed here; history is written there. India has almost everything, but for crude oil and a few rare-earth materials, and yet for crucial technologies it still has to look to others. For the most central engines of defence, for fighter-jet engines, there is dependence on imports. The indigenous engine project was sanctioned in 1989; more than two thousand crore rupees and three and a half decades later, there is still no engine fit to fly a fighter, and the Tejas flies on an American one. The world is reaching the sixth-generation fighter jet, and here there is not even an indigenous engine for the fourth. A war begins, and one day the supply is cut off, and then what?

AI arrived as a large opening, and that opening too has been all but lost. America and China built the frontier models; not one of the world’s leading AI models has come from India. This country stayed crouched in the shell of safety that lokdharma prescribes, afraid of risk, afraid of the new experiment.

It is the same in farming. India takes pride in calling itself an agricultural country. And what are its actual distinctions in the field? It stands among the largest exporters of beef in the world, almost all of it water-buffalo meat, carabeef, and its cities crowd the top of the lists of the most polluted on earth. The big innovations have usually happened elsewhere: Israel built models of cultivation on barren land; the Japanese method of rice cultivation changed the understanding of paddy. Institutions like Pusa have certainly given new varieties and seeds, but the breakthroughs are few. All of this was done to itself; it is nobody else’s conspiracy.

Lokdharma will not let you take risks; it will not let you become a risk-taker. It says, do as everyone has done, whatever comes handed down from behind is the best, keep repeating it. When the central instruction of life is imitation, where will creation come from? Whether it is AI, defence technology, farming or universities, the default reaction everywhere is that someone else should do it and this country will copy it, take the licence, rather than build it. This has become the national habit. The note of lokdharma says safety is the highest thing, like an over-protective mother forever stopping the child from going out, hiding him under the end of her sari. A society that will not give its young, its scientists, its women the freedom to experiment, how will it ever become a nation of any vigour?

There was a news item these days. At a temple in Madhya Pradesh, the religious observance of Independence Day was held on the eleventh of August, because by the temple’s panchang the true tithi of independence fell on that day. The tricolour of the calendar on one side, the tricolour of the muhurat on the other. Nor is this a village eccentricity; the country’s own stock exchanges open for a formal muhurat trading session every Diwali, the financial heart of the nation setting its books by the panchang. This is exactly the condition. The train may arrive at seven in the evening. You will still reach the station at ten at night, because your reckoning says the moment is now. The fifteenth of August is a fact, it is history. But there is no respect here for facts. My belief, my conviction, my fantasy, my astrologer, that is what I will follow. A country that gives no value to fact will give none to knowledge; and for a country that gives no value to knowledge, there is no surprise in its subjugation.

Today’s Generation Z is buried in astrology apps too, and a market of thousands of crores in these apps is turning over. The same astrology that pushed this country back in the past feeds, even today, the fear and the ego seated within. Lokdharma is dominant still; its grip has not loosened, it has only come forward in new shapes.

A Day for Vigilance, Not Celebration

So on this Independence Day my request is only this: celebrate, but even amid the celebration, let the gaze turn inward for once. The sword that has hung over the country for a thousand years has not lifted yet. The danger is equal, the danger remains, and the cause of that danger is internal. The greatest enemy sits within, not in the house next door but in the very heart, in the very lokdharma. It will not come from outside; it lies in that inner dishonesty which turns from fact, is afraid of the question, walks by fantasy instead of Shruti, invests in ritual in the place of knowledge, and takes pride in keeping half the population locked in the kitchen.

And so, even as this Independence Day is celebrated, remember that vigilance has no single day. The festival is now; the watchfulness must be from now too, and every day after. This is not a matter of any declared result, of any medal of victory; it points a direction, and nothing more. Be careful, wake up. The direction is inward, and no one has promised a destination. Freedom asks to be lived as a responsibility rather than enjoyed as a festival; otherwise the sword stays where it is, and the next slavery, different from the old, will be no less deadly.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, an unannounced transfer occurs. A parent’s unspoken fear becomes our ambition, a family’s definition of what counts as a life well lived becomes our standard. And the community’s old shames settle into the nervous system as something that feels indistinguishable from personal guilt. We do not remember accepting any of this. But by the time we are old enough to notice, the weight already feels like part of us.

The weight was placed before the question of consent was even available to us, and not all of it in the same way. A mother’s fear of scarcity gets transmuted into an urgency around money which the child internalizes as her own personality. Similarly, a father’s equation of dignity with professional rank subtly shapes the child’s aspirations and perceived shortcomings. And then there is everything culture did without anyone in particular doing it: the long instruction, absorbed before it could be noticed as instruction, about what a woman’s life is for or what a man is permitted to feel. None of it was chosen. It simply accumulated, the way things do when no one questions them.

Years pass, and the absorbed becomes the assumed, and what is assumed long enough, we defend. What entered us as someone else’s anxiety we now call our values. What was handed to us without our knowledge we now guard as conscience, as responsibility, as the shape of a good life. We feel guilty when we begin to question any of it, as though the questioning is the betrayal rather than the original imposition. But where did it actually come from? The weight was someone else’s unfinished business: their incompleteness, their fear of what might happen if things were done differently. It was usually passed on not from cruelty, but from their limited understanding. We were not consulted, we were simply near.

The question is not what to do with the weight. That comes later, if it comes at all. What is worth sitting with first is simpler: have we ever actually looked at what we are carrying, and asked, honestly, when and why we picked it up? Or have we only carried it, and named the carrying our ‘selves’?

Memory itself is neutral, mechanical, the same function that lets you recall a phone number or the way home without any preference for one over the other. Left alone, it would let most things fade, including the old slight that still bothers you for no reason you can name. The ego is what keeps the slight alive, picking through that storage and pulling out exactly what serves its story while leaving the rest to fade on its own. Two or three wounds, revisited often enough, end up bigger in your head than they ever were on the actual day.

This happened to me, therefore I am this: that’s the formula, run on every grudge the ego hasn’t let go of. Take away the inherited grievances and the tally of who owes you what, and there’s less of you left than you’d like to admit.

It isn’t only the past that gets treated this way. A future self gets the identical treatment, except hope stands in for memory. That self hasn’t arrived yet and probably won’t arrive exactly as imagined, but looking forward does roughly the same job as looking back, something for the ego to hold onto besides whatever is happening right now. Call the whole arrangement time, if you like. It is mostly just this: memory pulling one way, hope pulling the other, with very little left over for the present.

None of this gets solved by deciding to let go, which is usually just the ego writing itself a new story, the one where it gets to play the part of someone who finally moved on. What actually happens, more often than people expect, is that tonight’s grudge didn’t arrive because it was that strong. The ego needed something familiar to hold, the way it always does, and a decade-old slight happened to be sitting right there.

You have been wronged. A leaked paper is theft of your years. This time the theft has taken young lives. No honest voice can speak of these weeks without first bowing to the dead. Let that be said first, because it is true.

And let a second thing be said just as plainly, so that nobody twists this article later. I am not against protesting on the streets. The street has its place in a democracy. A day may come when I myself say: now march. This article has only one condition, and it is the condition every examination hall enforces: first prove you are fit to sit the paper. What follows is not a prohibition. It is a fitness test. And a fitness test is not a purity or perfection test. I am not asking you to become a perfect saint before you raise a slogan. Perfection is not needed; inner honesty is. The fitness demanded here is not perfection; it is direction.

And let a third thing be said, so that this article cannot be used as anyone’s shield. The state stands indicted. An administration under which question papers travel faster than justice has failed its first duty. The syndicates that sell children’s futures for cash deserve the harshest prosecution the law can build, and the agencies that let them flourish deserve the deepest audit. Nothing that follows dilutes that verdict by one drop.” Placing the state’s indictment in the opening, before any demolition of the protestor begins, structurally forecloses the “he’s absolving the government.

Now allow one simple observation. In every act of injustice there are two things, not one. First, the action. Second, your understanding of the action and response to it. The action was done to you. The response is being done by you, right now, live. You have chosen protest as your response. Very well. You are examining the minister with full ruthlessness. Now extend the same examination to the examiner. If the test is fair, why should anyone be exempt? Including you.

A small test of honesty

Every day the messages pour in by the thousands. The country is burning. Do something. Please, please do something. Fine. Before the doing, one small test.

The paper leaked. Somebody sold it. So somebody also bought it. Now show me one buyer of the paper in the march. Show me one young man who bought the leaked paper, took his advantage from it, and is on the road today shouting that the system is rotten. Can you find him? No, because he does not exist. Then is this protest really against leakage? Ask yourself, in the privacy of your own head: the students whom the next leak reaches in time, will they be marching or memorising the leaked paper? Only your own honesty can answer that.

And tell me this. Is it not the ego’s oldest trick to shout about the action so that the actor is never discussed? “Do something, do something!” The louder the chant of doing, the safer the doer sits inside. Unexamined. Unwashed. Untouched. Always listen to what is not being said. Nobody on any stage, placard, or hashtag is saying: let us look at the one who acts. Because the moment you look there, the game is up.

Understand a simple thing. The universe is a well-run place. No forest demands reform. No river files a petition. Only man’s world keeps begging for correction. Why? Because man acts from a corrupt centre. And no rearrangement of actions has ever cleaned a centre. The outside never improves until the spoiler inside is stopped. The spoiler inside needs stopping. Correction is not a new action. Correction is the cleaning of the centre of the old one. That is all this article asks of you. Not that you leave the street, but that you clean the one who walks on it.

The race, or only the referee?

Look at what your placards demand. A fair examination. An accountable minister. In other words, a cleaner race. Not one placard in the whole capital asks the prior question: is this race so important that a young person takes his life for it?

More than 2.27 million aspirants sat this year’s medical entrance exam. Then it was cancelled outright, once the leak was confirmed. Now see the deeper numbers. They answer a question nobody is asking. In 2022, this country recorded 13,999 student suicides. That is a rise of more than eighty percent since 2011. In 2021, over fifteen hundred young people under thirty ended their lives with “failure in examination” written as the reason. One coaching town alone counted twenty-six such deaths in a single recent year. Now mark the dates. No paper had leaked in those years. The exams were clean. The children still died anyway.

So the leak did not build the machine that equates a rank with a life. The leak only exposed it. For years, a whole civilisation has told its seventeen-year-olds that their self-worth is tied to their scorecards and entrance-exam-ranks. And the seventeen-year-olds believed it, because nobody offered them a deeper account of who they are. The ego stakes its whole existence on a result. When the result collapses, the young person concludes that he has collapsed. That conclusion is the real killer. A movement that wins a resignation but leaves this machine untouched is preparing for the next round of casualties. If you truly mourn the dead, mourn them at the root.

Who opened the door for the monkey?

A monkey entered the house. It emptied the fridge, smashed the crockery, wrecked the room. Terrible monkey, no argument. Now the mother returns. Whom does she slap? The monkey, or the child who left the door open? Let the monkey be caught, caged, and prosecuted. Full support. The monkey’s trial and the door’s inquiry are not rivals. Both must run. I am only asking why one of them has ten million investigators and the other has none.

You are running a very energetic anti-monkey movement. I am asking a quieter question. Who opened the door? And please get me right: catching the monkey and examining the door are not rival activities. Both must happen. One does not cancel the other.

This is a democracy. No divinely appointed ruler sits over you. The people you now want to drag from their chairs were carried to those chairs by you. In daylight. With music. Today you vote for a man. In two years you march against him. In five, you will garland his replacement, and then march against the replacement. Before demanding answers from the government, answer one question yourself. What exactly were you doing in the polling booth? And the inquiry will not stop there. If that one choice was blind, why trust the others? The course chosen for the salary. The friendships kept for use. The marriage negotiated like a tender. If every decision runs from the same unexamined centre, you cannot claim that only one political decision misfired while the rest of your life is in fine working order.

And do not tell me the voter cannot be awakened. That belief is the quiet cynicism inside this loud protest. A self-certified minority has decided that the electorate will sleep forever, so the correction must be imposed on its behalf by the awakened few. The one who says he loves the people has quietly given up on the people. Every real change in this land has come by the other road. The man who ended the burning of widows led no long marches. He was a teacher. He sat people down and taught, and took a lifetime of abuse for teaching. Gandhi walked out of high politics to teach villages how to live. Without this, he asked, what freedom? Tagore went further. Freedom won by spinning wheels, without awakened minds, is one more ritual. And see what happens when the law changes but the centre does not. The woman was pulled off the husband’s pyre. The same untouched centre then burned her in the kitchen for dowry, in numbers the pyre never matched. Change the rules without changing the centre, and only the method of burning changes.

The routes of change stand open even now. Democracy is the only system in history with revolutions printed on the calendar: it’s a beautiful system with in-built provision for revolutions. Those revolutions are called elections. In India, every few months, some state votes. Every five years, the nation does. The courts stand open. Fast-track courts for paper leak cases were announced this very week. Some of the biggest states are going to polls within the next few months. Why do these routes bore you? Because they demand the one labour the street never demands: awakening the voter. Shouting takes an afternoon. Educating the masses takes more effort and real dedication and deep love for the ordinary masses. The ego prefers the quick transaction, and names its distrust of the capacity of the commons as urgency.

Note carefully what is being said here. I am not against street revolutions. Nobody is taking the street away from you. The street is being kept for you, the way a father keeps the car keys for a son who has not yet learnt to drive. The road is not the problem. The driver is. Learn to drive, and the keys are yours.

The Intimate Revolution Comes First

Now the question you will hate me for. And remember, even as you hate me for it, I agree with the importance of the outer revolution. But outer revolution must follow inner revolution, or it is only an outing. So: you want to burn the system? First list your stakes in the same system you are loudly hating today.

The ministry you wish to gherao: does nobody in your family draw a salary from one just like it? The father whose feet you touch every morning, does he not serve in the very machinery you call corrupt? Has its extra income - legally called black money - not been quietly set aside for your sister’s dowry? And will you not accept that arrangement without a word, since after the dowry is paid, the property stays with you? On the morning of the great march: “Mummy, extra parathas today, I am off to do revolution.” Whose money bought the flour, beta? Is the money not coming from a beneficiary of the same system you are hating today? Shouldn’t you first turn your hate honest by disowning everything that you continue to receive from the same corrupt system?

The French Revolution offered a marvellous sight. Crowds came to burn the shops. First they tried on the good clothes. Then they stuffed the meat into their pockets. Then they lit the fire. You cannot burn what feeds you, clothes you, and has already booked your wedding hall. Even your war on a blind system begins after checking the right muhurt, with the lemon and chilli your mother slipped into your pocket against the evil eye.

So here is a qualifying exam for revolutionaries. Announce at home: I refuse the corrupt rupee. I refuse the dowry economics. I disown the inheritance built from what I publicly call rotten. Did you take this exam? Even once? Understand its purpose. This exam does not cancel your march. It qualifies you for it. Pass it, and you walk onto the road with an inner authority no police barricade can stop. Skip it, and you are only noise that will tire by evening. A revolution that reaches the road but never reaches the dining table has not begun. And it cannot reach the dining table, because it never started in the heart. What starts in the heart does not begin as hatred of the minister. It begins as one unbearable question: why am I the way I am?

The protester becomes the protested

History keeps telling one joke, and nobody laughs. Half a century ago, this country saw its largest student uprising, against corruption itself. Its young heroes then ruled states for decades. The record of that rule includes the very corruption convictions their movement was born to prevent. Fifteen years ago, at this same protest ground in the capital, another anti-corruption wave electrified the nation. Its crusader became a governing politician, collected corruption cases of his own, and this month walked back into the same ground, now as a supporting act to your agitation. Decades earlier, a students’ movement in the east made a thirty-two-year-old the chief minister. His government drowned in its own scandals. Three generations. Three uprisings. One result. Nothing changed these men, and that is the whole point. The chair did not corrupt the pure. The chair only handed a bigger stage to an ego nobody had ever questioned, least of all its owner. Rotate the patients as often as you like. The disease holds the ward.

Our neighbourhood has run this experiment three times in four years. On the island to our south, crowds stormed the palace and the president fled. Austerity arrived anyway, because economics does not check who sleeps in the palace. To our east, students toppled a long-ruling government in a season of blood. Within months, the young revolutionaries were themselves in office, learning what it feels like to be protested against. To our north, a young generation burned the parliament building itself. Dozens died. The government fell. The rot stayed exactly where it was. Three times the ego changed the guard and kept the palace.

Now understand what these examples prove and what they do not. They do not prove that marching is useless. They prove that unfit marchers are useless. In every one of these cases, the marching succeeded. The government fell. The street won. And nothing changed, because the winners were the same unexamined egos as the losers. The failure was never in the feet. It was in the centre the feet carried. That is why fitness comes first. Not instead of the march. Before it.

And there is plain arithmetic. If the street decides, the street belongs to whoever brings more feet. The majority that elected this government can also march. The day it does, the question is no longer justice against injustice. It is crowd against crowd, and the bigger crowd wins. That has a name, and the name is not revolution. It is anarchy. And anarchy has never once favoured the young, the poor, or the just.

One more thing about crowds, since you love yours. The fuel of this movement is advertised as anger. The anger itself is justified. The wound is real. The fear underneath it is also real and rational. But under the anger sits fear. Fear for the seat. Fear for the year. Fear for the future the ego had already registered in its own name. The crowd is where fear goes to feel brave. That courage is borrowed. And borrowed courage must be returned when the crowd disperses. At midnight, alone in his room, the young man meets the same unfaced fear, and no slogan comes to save him. A movement that cannot survive solitude is not awakening. It is fear, marching in formation.

The trophy and the two hands

Suppose you win. The minister resigns. Bands, speeches, ten million reels. What has a whole generation just been taught? That noise succeeds. That confrontation pays. That the loudest wound collects the largest settlement. “You caused me hurt and now you shall pay for it” becomes the operating philosophy of a hundred million young lives. Watch the mechanism. It is subtle. The ego does not weep because it was hurt. It weeps because it has not yet been paid for the hurt. The resignation is the payment. And a compensated victim never again faces the mirror. Why would he? The account is settled.

And what a bargain you will have struck. More than fifty paper leaks in eight years, across eight states. Over 1.4 crore aspirants put at risk. The opposition itself counts over a hundred and fifty compromised examinations in a decade. Now check the colours of the governments that presided over those states. Every major party features. The leak mafia is gloriously secular and perfectly bipartisan. So tell me: which of the fifty leaks does your one resignation answer? Prosecute the guilty. Every one of them. In courts armed with real teeth. That is accountability. A scalp is a trophy, and trophies educate nobody.

This is also the verdict on your banners. Picture a bird trapped on the ground. All its life it has walked left. One day it declares revolution: from now on, it will walk right. Is it free now? Or is its slavery deeper, since the one thing it still refuses is flight? Left and right have both ruled. Both leaked. Both failed, and failed identically. They are not opposites. They are the two hands of the same ego. One says the world suffers because of them. The other says the world suffers because of those. Neither ever says: let me first examine the one who is so certain about the world. Their most celebrated prophet built an entire science of man with no room for the one who chooses within. His revolution never arrived, outer or inner. Love cannot even be defined inside his framework. A theory in which a saint’s love for his Beloved means nothing cannot explain human beings, let alone free them.

Krishna’s diagnosis: the mirror as the revolution

Self-knowledge is not a long postponement of justice. It is the condition that makes justice possible without simply rearranging the same blindness.

Here is the finest proof that wisdom and action go hand-in-hand. Krishna stood on a battlefield, not in a hermitage. He also could not teach everybody. He did not address the crowd on the other side of the field. He took one warrior, the most consequential one. And he refused to let him shoot a single arrow until that warrior had self-knowledge. Mark this well: he refused to let him fire, and he equally refused to let him flee. Arjuna wanted to drop his bow and walk away. Krishna did not permit that either. The Gita is not a manual of retreat. It happens before the war. Not after it. Not instead of it. Krishna did not cancel the fight. He purified the fighter, and then he said: Now Fight!

You will ask me: can we keep waiting forever for internal reform? Well, you don’t have to. Note how long Arjuna’s purification took. Not twelve years in a forest. One conversation, on the battlefield itself, with both armies already arrayed. Self-knowledge is not a decades-long prerequisite designed to postpone all action forever. The Gita was taught between two armies, in less time than your longest march. So do not say the bar is set impossibly high. The bar is honesty, and honesty does not take years at all.

That is my whole position, stated as simply as I can state it. I have no problems with a street protest. I have a problem with blindness on the street. Send the blind onto the road, and you will have accidents, not revolutions. First let the eyes open. Then I will myself say: now march. So here is the sequence, worth more than any march route ever drawn. Educate yourself in the self: one hour a day with a text that questions the questioner, before the phone is touched. Then educate the voter beside you. If one man can reach a crore, you can reach a hundred. Your first ten are already in your hostel corridor. Then vote, then organise, then contest, and then march. Yes, march. March as Arjuna entered battle, with the teacher’s words settled in him, not as a crowd marches, with slogans substituting for clarity. The march of the awakened is not merely permitted; it is awaited. This country is waiting for it.

And know where the real protest of this land is already underway. Not on any road. It is wherever a young person sits with a text that cracks something twenty centuries old inside. I am myself witness to a huge community of students undergoing a real and silent revolution since years. However, no camera enters a kitchen, or a small shop, to see how a life changed there. Roads make for good insta reels, hearts do not. But history turns in hearts, not in headlines.

The word revolution means a complete turning. So turn, but turn fully: towards yourself. Blocking a road takes an afternoon. Facing yourself takes everything you have. That is why the street is always crowded and the mirror is always free. And the mirror holds the final secret no manifesto has ever contained: there is no revolution without love. Not slogan-love, but love as the ego’s own decision to turn upon itself and dissolve. Rage rearranges the world and leaves the actor intact. Love alone changes the actor.

Dear youth, you want revolution, and you are right to want it. You are only mistaken about its sequence and place. First the mirror, then the march. First the eyes, then the road. The real revolution is not housed in any ministry or maidan. It first lives in you. Claim it first. Then come out, and I will be marching in your middle.

The tour began on 30 May at the Cambridge Union, moderated by Professor Jaideep Prabhu. That same day, a student put her point plainly. "At Cambridge, learning is based on evidence, and every belief is tested against a standard. So how is this philosophy any different from any other belief?" It is the kind of question most figures in this field rarely face on a public stage. The answer was not a defence. "Let us rebuild this framework right now, right here, from scratch," I said, "leaning as little as possible on belief and dogma." If a framework is universal, it cannot belong to any one person; it has to be built together and tested together. What took place was not a lecture but a construction, halted again and again by objections and demands for clarity. A session scheduled for one hour stretched into nearly three sittings across two days. Later, when a participant thanked me for sharing "my philosophy," I corrected her: it was not my philosophy; it had been built together, in that very room. When someone asked where the framework drew its authority from, I set the question aside. Nothing had yet been asserted that needed defending. The "I" being questioned is real only because it keeps being uttered; you yourself are its only proof.

In the days that followed Cambridge, the tour rested on this same principle. At the London School of Economics there was a dialogue with Professor Jonathan Birch, who has led the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience and whose work has shaped Britain's animal welfare laws. At University College London there was a long conversation with Professor Steve Fleming, an expert in metacognition. In Hampstead, there was one with the Cambridge-trained biologist Rupert Sheldrake. At Queen Mary University, with Professor Lars Chittka, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert in insect cognition, as well. And with the Harvard-educated psychologist Dr Melanie Joy, who works on the psychology of eating animals, as well.

These gatherings assembled not for emulation but for examination. Those present had every reason to challenge the framework I was putting forward, not only in practical terms but in their own professional interest.

The Mistaken "I"

At the centre of this philosophical framework is a question that shifts the very source of human problems. The real issue is not external but psychological: a mistaken sense of "I" that identifies itself with the body and the mind. Vedanta calls it the ego. From it arise those patterns of fear, desire, conflict and consumption that widen into social and ecological crises. The implication is direct, and uncomfortable: without examining this inner structure, external solutions such as law, technology and reform will remain incomplete, because the same agent that creates the problem stays active within the solution too.

This error reaches furthest at the table. In physical terms a human being is almost entirely animal; the small remainder is not a mark of rank but a swelling, and that swelling is the ego. It is what lets a person look away from the eyes of a lamb, and the same practised looking-away later lets him look away from the eyes of his own child. No appetite of the body requires this; the demand is psychological. It is not the human being who kills; it is the ego.

During London Climate Action Week, the present climate effort was compared to a society that keeps repairing roads and ambulances without touching the condition of the drunk driver. The belief that technology and policy will solve the crises has to be abandoned. Technology is born not of human need but of human desire, and what the world calls success is, to a large extent, only another name for a growing carbon footprint. At the LSE, after a conversation with the former French climate diplomat Gautier Houël, who has worked around COP26, he wrote on his social media: "Most climate discussions stay focused on technology, policy, finance or innovation. This one began somewhere else: with us."

Rooms Built to Test

At Queen Mary University of London, when the ego was called the "master exploiter" seated behind every discovery, Professor Chittka offered examples where scientific work led directly to conservation. "I am perhaps a little less pessimistic," he said. The answer came not by stepping back from the framework but from within it. The agent that does the damage is the one that repairs it too, and the repair does not acquit it. It is a clean-up campaign run by the exploiter himself. When the violence of animals was called instinct rather than something psychological, Chittka countered with field observations. The answer was that the observer is himself projecting his human interiority onto animal behaviour. "Sir, you yourself have long campaigned against anthropomorphism," I said, "and I am afraid that at this moment you are doing exactly that." I asked him to name a single problem on the planet that was not of human making. He would not accept the terms, saying he was reluctant to accept that human beings are bad or evil by default, and he offered his own life as an instance: he had been shaped by his experiences, he said, and saw nothing wrong in the view. That, I replied, is still the ego speaking. Neither bowed, and neither was left without an answer. The dialogue ended without agreement, but with full engagement on both sides.

The LSE evening was different. The room was full of warmth, not tension. But the warmth did not lessen the central disagreement. It was argued that animal welfare law has been growing for nearly two centuries, and yet neither the rate of species extinction nor per-capita meat consumption has fallen. The one who makes the law and the one who breaks it are, in the end, the same person. Professor Birch did not give up his ground on the instrument. "Do laws help? I think they do. But I do not believe they solve all our problems." He granted, too, that directly cultivating compassion would be the better road, and reached for Bentham: the question is not whether a being can reason, but whether it can suffer. The sharpest moment of the evening came when Professor Birch said, "But I think we matter." I answered at once, "No, we do not." His counter-question was direct: what measurable change has come from my work? An answer exists. Media reports record more than a million animals saved from slaughter in 2024, and more than two hundred thousand registered students in my structured programmes of self-enquiry. Whether these figures meet Birch's standards is a fair matter for debate, though the numbers are real.

Even at UCL, when Professor Fleming appreciated an analogy of mine that separates metacognition from self-knowledge, the disagreement remained. A car's speedometer reads the system, while the driver examines himself and, in the end, finds that there is no driver at all. But Fleming did not agree. "There is one part of your analogy where I would perhaps differ," he said, "and that is the notion of the driver." I did not sidestep the point but carried it forward. If the system has no separate dashboard, then the very sense of a separate ego reading the dashboard is itself the error, a loop turning back upon itself with no real existence. And insight begins precisely where that loop steps back. Fleming immediately came back and asked: if the ego is an illusion, then whose is the error? My answer was that the one who is speaking and thinking is the one predicating itself as well. No separate observer exists apart from the ego who could say that there is an error. Fleming took the disagreement to its very limit, holding out a research goal that runs against the whole framework: an account of the mind so complete in its computations that there is no need to admit any third thing. My answer was direct: "You may explain it, and the ego will say, I did the explaining." By the close, his account of the evening and mine had settled on the same image: two people climbing one hill from opposite sides. Dr Megan Peters, who chaired the session, ended by noting how much the two approaches had converged, and where they still diverged.

With Dr Melanie Joy, the exchange turned the question inward. She agreed that the deepest change must be spiritual, and asked whether psychological work might prepare the ground for it, giving people the capacity to face the harder question. I marked the boundary of her field rather than dismissing it. Psychology is the ego studying the ego-infested mind; it brings the disturbed mind into view, but not the one doing the disturbing, who hides behind the study as the one conducting it. She did not concede, and said she was not sure she could have faced the spiritual question at all without first doing the psychological work on herself.

In Kingston, the conversation with Rupert Spira was the closest philosophically, yet even here it was not allowed to dissolve into mutual admiration. Where most Advaita teaching turns towards awareness, I keep bringing the conversation back to the ego. "If you are speaking of spirituality without the ego," I said, "then we are speaking of medicine without the patient." He offered a Zen line on speech and silence, and said he agreed with me up to a point. I did not accept the reading, and said the weight of that story falls not on the speaking or the silence but on the "I" that imagines itself doing either. Here the vocabulary was extended on its own ground in such a way that it challenged not only the conversation but the tradition standing behind it.

A Weak Engine for Growth

In these dialogues the risk leaned to one side. The professors were on their own ground, in their own subject, in their own institution, before their own colleagues. The conversation was held in their language, the language of empirical science, and not in the tradition's own vocabulary. In a format of that kind, the framework had to be tested every time, and there was no room to escape by saying, "this lies beyond the scope of my tradition." The established guru circuit usually keeps its distance from a format like this.

Comparisons are inevitable, so it is better to make them with care. Vivekananda at Chicago in 1893 belongs to another category: great oratory before a receptive audience, not cross-examination. The nearer forms are older and rarer. The old Indian practice of shastrartha staged exactly this kind of public contest, a thinker placing his position, and his standing, before a qualified judge. In the modern period, the long conversations between J. Krishnamurti and the physicist David Bohm come closest in form. One small coincidence is worth noting: Rupert Sheldrake, who spent close to two hours in dialogue at Hampstead, had known Krishnamurti, and recalled their meetings in England, California and India.

The framework I carried was not built to gather large crowds. It has no branded technique, no repeatable programme, no certificate. These are not statements that recruit customers; they generate friction. A format like this produces more resistance than enrolment. By conventional measures, it is a weak engine for growth.

What this proves is limited, but real. It made a demand of both sides that traditional gurudom does not. The speaker had to bear the risk of being shown wrong, and the audience had to take part in examination in place of applause. In a field where the test of success is usually the size of the crowd, this tour set down another test: whether the argument holds up in that room. It is an unusual question to ask, and it says a great deal. Whether this can grow larger, or even wishes to, remains an open question.

On 30 May, I was at the Cambridge Union in conversation with Professor Jaideep Prabhu. In that hall, where Churchill and Hawking have both been heard, the audience before me was made up largely of economics and management students. Their questions were intelligent, serious, and honest. But one thing became clear very quickly. However sophisticated the education, there comes a point where no theory helps and no degree comes to the rescue. At that point, the question is no longer about the world. It is about the questioner. A one-hour session stretched into conversations over nearly two days.

And what I saw at Cambridge, I saw throughout the tour. At Oxford, in the British Parliament, at the London School of Economics, and in public dialogues. The questions differed. The lack was the same. People know a great deal, but they do not know themselves. That is the subject of this article. What do the world’s finest universities teach, and what do they still fail to teach?

Let us begin fairly. Western higher education has immense strengths. It has reason, evidence, analysis, discipline, and intellectual honesty. Science has dignity because it does not rush to conclusion. It says: first I will observe, test, verify. That deserves respect. Spirituality is not the enemy of science. Science must receive its due respect. Matter belongs to science. Anyone who wants to understand the outer world needs the scientific temper.

On 8 June, at Oxford, I was speaking on the second mantra of the Ishavasya Upanishad in a setting connected, a century and a half earlier, with Max Müller’s role in introducing that very text into the Western scholarly world. On 12 June, at the British Parliament, I spoke on “Asato Ma Sad Gamaya.” In all these places, one point kept returning. Universities know how to study the world. They know matter, economy, society, history, biology, politics. But the most important question is left untouched. In the statement “I know,” who is this “I”?

That is where education remains incomplete.

If you inform a person about the world, but never examine the one gathering that information, education remains incomplete. The purpose of education is the liberation of consciousness. Consciousness is bound in two ways: by ignorance of the world, and by ignorance of oneself. And of the two, ignorance of oneself comes first. If the eye itself is distorted, then whatever it sees will also be seen wrongly. In that case, all outer knowledge will end up serving inner distortion.

So the real problem is not a lack of information. The real problem is the condition of the knower.

The modern educated human being knows plenty. He knows data, markets, technology, management, policy, and career strategy. But he does not know why he knows what he knows. He does not ask what his education is serving. Is it serving truth, or is it serving the same old fearful, ambitious, greedy, insecure ego? That is the decisive question.

Knowledge is value-neutral, the user of knowledge is not. A tool is neither good, nor bad in itself. But if the one holding the tool is inwardly distorted, the tool becomes a weapon. Technology then serves exploitation. Economics serves greed. Politics serves domination. Psychology teaches sales, not freedom. Even the language of sustainability becomes a way of making consumption look more decent, instead of questioning the consumer.

On 2 July, in a conversation with the Cambridge-trained biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake on consciousness and the limits of science, the same point became even clearer. Science asks: what is this? Science asks: how does this work? But science, by its nature, does not investigate the one asking those questions. As long as science remains within its domain, it is honest and beautiful. The trouble begins when the limits of science are declared to be the limits of reality itself. Then science turns into scientism. And scientism is very useful to the ego. It allows a person to say: only what is outside is real. In that way, he keeps himself outside examination.

That is where the real trouble begins.

At the London School of Economics, in a dialogue with Professor Jonathan Birch on animal consciousness, whose research contributed to UK law recognising even octopuses and crabs as sentient beings, I offered the example of a drunk driver. If a man is driving drunk and we keep improving the roads, softening the barriers, speeding up the ambulance, and tightening the law, will the basic problem be solved? No. There may be some relief, but the root remains untouched. This is what modern civilisation keeps doing. In the very week I was in London, there were severe heatwaves, yet the discussion kept returning to new technology, not to the appetite producing the heat in the first place. There is a climate crisis, so we propose new technology. There is a mental-health crisis, so we propose new therapies. There is social violence, so we propose new policy. There is cruelty to animals, so we propose new law. All of this has its place. But one question is still avoided. Who is the one doing all this? What is going on within him?

The same point came up again in my conversation with PETA’s senior vice-president on 3 July. The exploited may change. Sometimes it is the animal, sometimes the river, sometimes the forest, sometimes another class of human beings. The exploiter remains almost the same: conditioned, fearful, acquisitive, violent ego. Unless education touches this ego, education produces civilised barbarism. The outer polish remains. The old darkness remains within.

Now let us turn to India.

India has had the language of self-knowledge. The Upanishads are here. Vedanta is here. There has long been the recognition that the knower too must be brought under examination. This is no small thing. The West took knowledge of the outer world to extraordinary heights. India’s real contribution was this: before you know the world, see who it is that is knowing. The Ishavasya expresses this in two words: vidya and avidya. If you pursue only avidya, only outer knowledge, you remain in darkness. If you cling only to vidya in a merely verbal or complacent sense, you fall into deeper darkness still. One crosses only by carrying both together. The fault is not in outer knowledge. The fault lies in the blindness of the one using it.

And India’s tragedy is this: we have repeated this wisdom far more than we have lived it. We have not allowed scripture to remain a force that changes life. We have turned it into identity, ritual, sentiment, convenience, and display. What could cut into a person, shake him, and transform him, we set aside. What could become spectacle, we kept.

So this is not a question of East versus West, nor of one civilisation being superior to another. There is incompleteness on both sides. The West knows the outer world very well, but falls silent on the knower. India had the language of the knower, but now often uses that very language to sustain the machinery of ego. There is mastery over objects there. There is command over words here. Yet in both places, human beings remain frightened, greedy, lonely, violent, restless, and insecure. The real issue is not civilisation. It is consciousness.

That is why, however great universities may be, they still do not educate the human being completely. They teach subjects. They teach skills. They provide information. They prepare careers. All of that has value. All of that deserves respect. Universities can produce fine teachers, trainers, specialists, and experts. But a human being needs something more. He needs a blow to the false centre from which he is living.

Even the students of Oxford and Cambridge, brilliant in their fields, can sense that something remains missing, some lack that neither degrees nor money can fill. But their education does not tell them that what is missing is the cleansing of the eye and the clearing of intent. Because if the knower himself is fearful, greedy, ambitious, and inwardly unclean, then even the best knowledge in the world will finally serve ego and violence.

So what do the world’s finest universities still not teach?

They do not teach you to ask whom your education is serving.
They do not teach you how to examine the knower.
They do not teach you what the restlessness for success really means.
They do not teach you that achievement without self-knowledge also becomes destructive.
They teach the world well. They do not ask who is receiving that knowledge.

And until these questions enter the centre of education, universities will continue to produce brilliant, capable, accomplished graduates, while the human being remains a cause of destruction for other species and for the Earth itself.

On June 14, Switzerland was asked to set one. The proposal, brought by the country’s largest party, would have capped the permanent resident population at ten million by 2050, with tightening measures triggered earlier and the EU free movement agreement at risk if the cap held too long. Turnout reached fifty-nine per cent. Nearly fifty-five per cent said no.

It is easy to read this as a story about immigration, and at the level of posters and platforms, that is what it was. Underneath sat a more interesting question, one the campaign never had to answer because the vote answered it by default: can a wealthy, secure nation set a limit for itself before crisis sets one for it? Switzerland was asked, and found it could not.

Switzerland’s fertility rate sits around 1.5, below the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady. The population stood at about 9.1 million by end-2025, with the over-sixty-fives now outnumbering the under-twenties; official projections put the figure at 10.5 million by 2055, almost all from migration. The number the proposal tried to hold was never the country’s own; migration supplied nearly all the growth it was meant to stop.

Foreign nationals already make up twenty-seven per cent of residents, over a third of the workforce, with hundreds of thousands more crossing the border daily for work. The campaign cited gross arrival figures without mentioning the exits set against them; net migration, the figure that actually moves the population, is a fraction of that. A cap sounds simple, but in practice meant unwinding the agreement that lets Swiss firms hire across Europe, and with it the trade carrying nearly half of Swiss exports. The government itself had warned that holding to any fixed number would demand measures incompatible with the country’s prosperity. It was an accurate description of the bill.

The housing pressure behind the campaign was real: Geneva’s vacancy rate fell to 0.34 per cent, among the tightest in Europe. But the shortage is first a matter of construction, zoning and underinvestment, not headcount, and would have produced the same crisis at any population level.

So when Swiss voters said no, they were mostly voting against a specific trigger, attached to a party leaning on fear of outsiders, in a year when severing ties to its largest market looked like self-harm. The no was local, contingent, reasonable on its own terms. But notice what the reasonableness conceals. The question of where a stop might fall was never put to a clean test, because by the time it reached the ballot, it had already been wired into every artery that would have to be cut before the question could be answered. The ceiling lost not to greed but to interdependence; the system had arranged itself so growth was the only answer compatible with everything else the country had built. Switzerland had been here before: in 2014, it narrowly voted to cap immigration, then quietly declined to enforce it, because the same agreements made enforcement cost more than the country would pay. The vote can say stop. The structure keeps moving.

Here the deeper pattern shows itself, and it has nothing to do with Switzerland alone. A person never produces a stable figure for enough. Ask someone with savings what amount would let him stop checking, and the number retreats as it is approached. The referendum makes visible that the same movement runs at civilisational scale, without anyone wanting more of anything.

Switzerland holds roughly the third-highest income per head on earth, by any ordinary measure a society that has arrived. Yet holding a number, merely holding it, could not survive contact with the machinery of how the place runs. No voter had to be greedy for this: a national income figure has no terminal value past which a country may stop, neither does a trade relationship or a labour market, and together they form a structure with the exact signature of an ego that cannot say enough: permanent forward motion, no terminal state, no one whose task is to ask whether the motion still serves anyone.

The cruder reading says Switzerland is rich and wished to stay rich. The truer reading is stranger: the proposal could have been drafted by cleaner hands, and the verdict would likely have been the same, because it was laid down in decades of treaties and hiring practices, each rational alone, none asking what all of them together were for. A civilisation’s reaching is dispersed across millions of decisions made by people not reaching for anything; it only loses anyone willing to own it. None of this makes the campaign innocent; trading in suspicion of outsiders’ answers for its own language. But the hostility to outsiders is a problem with an address. The inability to define enough has none, and that is why it outlives every election the louder problem loses. A Green parliamentarian, Sibel Arslan, observed that something shifted regardless of the result: capping a population now sits inside speakable policy in a way it did not before. A society can refuse a number and still be changed by having weighed one. A steadier-handed version of this vote might well pass. It would still not answer what this one raised, since passing a tighter mechanism is not the same as a system discovering a working sense of enough. Other wealthy nations should not mistake a different outcome for a different structure: not one keeps a stated population ceiling, and the absence of Switzerland’s quarrel elsewhere is not evidence of a healthier relationship to limits. It only means the question has not yet been put plainly enough to compel one. The number Switzerland was asked to hold would have begun retreating the moment it was reached, the way it retreats from a man watching a balance. What the vote leaves behind is who, if anyone, still stands close enough to ask why the retreating never stops

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That was the central claim of the session. Indian roots, he said, are not merely a matter of cultural identity. They represent a rigorous commitment to self-exploration, from which Vedanta, the Buddha, Saint Kabir, and other major Indian philosophical streams have emerged.

The setting mattered, but the argument went deeper than the setting. In a chamber associated with public life, policy, and power, he pointed to something more basic than outward achievement. Global expansion and success are often mistaken for freedom, he noted, whereas real freedom does not come from external accomplishments. It comes from recognising and dropping one’s inner bondages.

He then recited the Upanishadic prayer,

“Asato Ma Sad Gamaya, Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya, Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya,”

and unpacked its meaning. This, he said, is not merely a religious expression. It is a call to humanity’s inner journey, from untruth to truth, from ignorance to knowledge, and towards a life free from fear and limitation.

Outside the Parliament premises, he turned to the climate crisis and made the point even sharper. “For example, the climate crisis is a problem of (the human being’s) internal order, and lawmakers have to acknowledge that. It is not an emissions problem. It is a consciousness problem.” Climate change, social fragmentation, and mental unrest, he argued, all arise from the same inner disorder. Laws, policies, and technological measures may be necessary, but they cannot be sufficient if they do not address the root cause.

That same logic linked his recent public engagements at Cambridge, Oxford, and now the British Parliament. “The truth is not a product that I can redesign differently for different markets,” he said. Language and presentation may change with the audience and setting, but truth itself does not change.

On the relationship between Vedanta and modern science, he pointed to the same fundamental question: “For whom?” Science studies objects, he explained, whereas Vedanta investigates the knower who experiences all objects.

His comments on climate also carried the same warning. “What I’m saying is that without mass self-education, you are not going to succeed.” Green technologies, policies, and economic measures may be necessary, but they will not be enough if they do not address the limitless human urge to consume.

Acharya Prashant described the tour as an effort to meet global problems with the philosophy of the self. India’s greatest contribution, he said, is not its cultural symbols, but the self-knowledge that remains indispensable to all of humanity.

In the coming weeks, he will address audiences at the London School of Economics and King’s College London, and lead multiple sessions during London Climate Action Week, scheduled from June 20 to June 28.

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On June 8, Acharya Prashant delivered a session on the second verse of the Ishavasya Upanishad at Oxford University, revisiting a text that has travelled across continents and generations, yet continues to challenge the modern mind as deeply as ever.

Standing before the Oxford University Press building earlier that day, he reflected on Max Muller’s contribution and on the task that remains unfinished. Texts can travel across the world. Their words can enter libraries, universities, and academic discourse. But every generation must still discover their meaning for itself.

The significance of the occasion, therefore, extended beyond history. The question was not whether the Upanishad had reached the world. The question was whether the world had understood what the Upanishad asks.

And that question begins with a deceptively simple inquiry: Who is the actor?

The Unfinished Task

The Upanishads draw a distinction between vidya and avidya. Humanity today possesses an abundance of knowledge of the observable world. Such knowledge should continue to advance.

Yet another task remains unfinished: the task of knowing the knower.

Modern civilization has become exceptionally skilled at examining objects, systems, processes, markets, ecosystems, and galaxies. Far less attention is devoted to examining the one who examines.

Without self-knowledge, even knowledge itself can become dangerous. The same intelligence that builds can destroy. The same technology that serves can exploit. The same prosperity that promises freedom can deepen dependence. All of which we are already witnessing around us.

This is why the central question raised during a recent session on the second verse of the Ishavasya Upanishad was neither economic nor political.

It was far more fundamental:

Who is the actor behind every action?

Most discussions focus on actions, the Upanishads focus on the actor.

Every thought, every choice, every ambition, every policy, and every institution emerges from a particular consciousness.

To evaluate action while ignoring the actor is to examine consequences while overlooking their source.

No action is good or bad in itself. What makes it binding or liberating is the consciousness from which it springs.

This places the inquiry at an unusual location: not outside, but Inside. Not in the world first, but in the one who experiences and shapes the world.

The Ego as the Root of Suffering

The Upanishadic inquiry inevitably encounters the ego.

As discussed during the session:

“The ego is not merely the sufferer; it is suffering itself.”

Ordinarily, suffering appears to be something that happens to a person.

The Ishavasya Upanishad goes deeper. The structure that suffers is itself the source of suffering. This becomes especially visible in humanity’s endless search for fulfilment through accumulation, possession, achievement, status, and control.

The movement never ends because the seeker itself remains unsettled. What appears as an external crisis often has an internal origin.

The Fear of Death

The same dynamic appears in our relationship with mortality.

The body is born and dies according to natural law, yet the fear of death belongs primarily not to the body but to the ego.

The ego fears disappearance because its existence depends upon continuity. In that sense, much of human activity can be understood as an attempt to protect and extend an identity that feels fundamentally insecure.

Hence the observation:

“The body is a fact; the ego is an error.”

And therefore:

“The finest deeds happen in the absence of the ego.”

Freedom does not arise from granting the ego greater power, freedom arises from release from the ego’s compulsions.

The Crisis Beneath All Crises

Environmental degradation, sectarian conflict, geopolitical tensions, mental health challenges, and the threat of war are often treated as separate problems.

Yet they may share a common root.

Humanity has become extraordinarily capable of changing the world while remaining largely unfamiliar with itself.

Without self-knowledge and a mass-based education of the self, no lasting solution appears possible.

Technology can amplify intention, policy can regulate behaviour, economics can organise resources. But none of them can answer the question of who is using them and to what end, that question remains prior.

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Outwardly, we are more advanced than at any point in history. Inwardly, we are still cavemen.

That statement is not a condemnation of science or technology. I deeply respect science. Technology is necessary and valuable. The issue is not with the tools we create. The issue lies with the self that uses those tools.

Formal education equips us with skills, information, and expertise. It teaches us how to build, produce, innovate, and compete. Yet the questions that most determine how knowledge will ultimately be used are rarely asked.

What is desire?

Where do our wants come from?

Why do we want what we want?

Without addressing these questions, every advance risks becoming fuel for an inner emptiness that remains unexamined. Humanity has continuously expanded its power over the external world, but that power has repeatedly been directed toward satisfying a psychological hunger that remains insatiable. Even if the entire planet were exploited in this effort, the inner hunger would remain.

Climate Change and the Efficiency Trap

This becomes particularly visible in the way we approach climate change.

The crisis is often interpreted as a technological challenge requiring technological solutions. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that efficiency alone does not reduce consumption.

Steam engines improved, yet electricity use multiplied.

Electric vehicles are now presented as an answer, yet they bring with them cobalt and lithium mining, forest clearance, and ecosystem disruption.

The problem cannot be reduced to policy, technology, or leadership alone. Leaders are shaped not only by voters but also by consumers. And the consumer is the same self that no policy has yet touched.

During the discussion, I was asked whether there is enough time left for the kind of transformation being described.

My response was simple:

“Acceleration takes time. How much time does it take to stop where you are?”

Successive global climate conferences have failed to produce the required outcomes for one common reason. They assume that the solution demands more action. Yet the crisis itself is the product of too much action.

Vidya, Avidya, and the Ancient Diagnosis

Another question raised the possibility of bridging Eastern and Western worldviews, masculine and feminine perspectives, and different economic approaches.

The Upanishads offer a distinction that remains profoundly relevant: Vidya and Avidya.

Vidya refers to outward knowledge.

Avidya refers to inward wisdom.

This distinction may well be the oldest available diagnosis of an imbalance that modern civilization has only deepened.

The real bridge is not cultural, political, or economic.

The real bridge is inner honesty.

Without inner honesty, every attempt at synthesis remains superficial.

My own journey away from a corporate path after IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad emerged gradually from this realization. The problems I was being trained to solve appeared increasingly downstream of something far more fundamental,something society was scarcely noticing.

The One Experiment Humanity Has Not Tried

Over the last two hundred years, humanity has tried science, technology, economic growth, and exploration on an unprecedented scale.

It has achieved extraordinary advances in all of them.

Yet it continues to move toward war, ecological crisis, and inner dissatisfaction.

There is one thing humanity has not seriously attempted.

Mass education of the self.

The questions that remain largely unasked are precisely the questions that could change everything:

Who am I?

What do I truly want?

Will accumulation ever satisfy me?

Until these questions become central, our external achievements will continue to outpace our understanding of ourselves.

Returning to Ourselves

Through the Prashant Advait Foundation-PAF , students from more than 100 countries participate in an online night school every day of the month.

Together we study the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist teachings, the writings of Lao Tzu, and existential literature.

But these texts are not an end in themselves.

As I told the gathering:

“We are students of the self. These works are not the destination. They bring us back to ourselves.”

That return—to understanding oneself honestly and directly—may be the most important educational project of our times.

Acharya Prashant is currently on a UK tour. Following Cambridge, he will be speaking at Oxford, the London School of Economics, King's College London, and other leading institutions. Drawing upon the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Madhyamika Buddhism, and global wisdom literature, his work reaches audiences across more than 100 countries through books, lectures, and online platforms. To stay updated on his ongoing dialogues and public sessions, download AP app and follow his official channels and media platforms, where he continues to engage with some of the most pressing questions facing humanity today.

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A nation, like a person, can go long periods avoiding what it would prefer not to know about itself. The avoidance is rarely deliberate; it is built into the very categories through which the nation processes its own news. The economy occupies one set of conversations and one set of professionals; the climate occupies another; the inner condition of the citizen, if it is examined at all, belongs to a third domain often dismissed as private or soft. These separations make ordinary public life manageable. They also make certain kinds of seeing nearly impossible. Now and then, usually through a small public moment, easily missed, the cost of those separations becomes briefly visible.

Such a moment arrived in India this month. When our Prime Minister appealed to Indians to drive less, take public transport, work from home where possible, delay foreign travel, and refrain from buying gold, he made a request that was reasonable, practical, and entirely correct. It was also, in a more fundamental sense, an indictment.

Not of citizens who decline to comply, not of a government managing an acute energy shock with limited instruments, but of the kind of society that requires such an appeal in the first place. Few moments in public life see the head of government essentially conceding that state instruments cannot do this work alone. The appeal is, at one level, an admission of where the actual leverage lies.

The problem runs in two directions. One is ignorance: the ordinary citizen genuinely has no idea what his petrol consumption costs the country or the climate. The other is more uncomfortable: some of what needs to be known has been encountered and set aside, heard and quietly filed away, because genuinely absorbing it would require a reckoning with one’s own habits that is harder than not absorbing it. The first failure is educational. The second is a failure of intent. A society that was genuinely seeing would not have required this appeal, because it would have already arrived, through its own honest examination, at the restraint the appeal is now requesting.

What is actually at stake when the pump is filled or the jewellery counter visited? The answer runs along two axes simultaneously, and the fact that those axes are so rarely held together reveals the full scope of what has gone unexamined.

The Two Axes of a Single Failure

The economic axis is the easier one to trace. India spent 775 billion. The country imports roughly 87% of the crude it consumes; domestic production meets barely one-eighth of demand. Every vehicle on the road, every industrial furnace burning diesel, every flight taking off from an Indian airport, represents a transfer of foreign exchange out of the country and into the accounts of oil exporters.

The current account deficit moves in near lockstep with the global price of crude. With the Iran war having driven Brent past 28.4 billion in April 2026 alone, with the overall import bill rising 10% year-on-year as crude costs surged. From a record peak of 40 billion in the months since the Iran war began, driven substantially by the need to manage currency volatility rooted in elevated import costs. The rupee has lost approximately 7% of its value against the dollar in 2026 alone, trading around ₹96 and making it Asia’s worst-performing major currency, with the central bank repeatedly intervening to arrest the fall. India is simultaneously the world’s second-largest importer of gold, spending a record $72 billion on the metal in FY 2025-26, adding a further substantial drain on foreign exchange for what is primarily a consumption and status purchase. Together, crude oil and gold account for a structural vulnerability in the current account built not out of industrial necessity alone but out of two deeply entrenched habits of a society that has not asked what drives them.

The ordinary citizen, filling his car and picking up a gold chain for the festival season, has not been told that these two habits together constitute a structural national liability. He does not know what current account deficit means. He does not know that trade deficit, rupee weakness, inflation, and rising interest rates are, in large part, downstream consequences of collective consumption choices. He behaves as though the economy happens to him, not as something he produces with every transaction.

The second axis points in the other direction: toward the atmosphere, the glaciers, the species registers, and the sea. Before the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-eighteenth century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had held stable at approximately 280 parts per million for nearly six thousand years of recorded human civilisation. It now stands at 430 parts per million, a 54% increase occurring at a pace roughly a hundred times faster than any previous natural transition. Fossil fuel combustion is responsible for approximately 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions driving this change. Average global temperatures have risen approximately 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline; sea levels are rising.

Earth’s glaciers outside the polar ice sheets lost 408 gigatonnes of mass in the 2025 hydrological year alone, the second-highest annual loss on record, and the overwhelming majority of monitored Himalayan glaciers continue to show accelerating mass loss. These glaciers, often called the Third Pole, feed the rivers that supply freshwater to nearly two billion people across South and South-East Asia. Depending on the warming trajectory, a third to two-thirds of the remaining ice could vanish by the end of this century.

Species are being driven to extinction by fossil fuel combustion at rates that climate scientists classify as the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s half-billion-year history, the first caused not by asteroid or volcanic event but by the accumulated choices of one species running on unexamined desire. India’s own carbon dioxide emissions grew by 4.6% in 2024, the highest rate among major economies, and the country has contributed nearly a third of global energy-sector emissions growth over the past decade. The physical consequences register in India’s own geography: erratic monsoons, coastal flooding, and heatwaves that now routinely exceed physiological survival thresholds across several states.

The ordinary citizen has not been told that the petrol he burns connects him to the glacier thinning above the Gangotri, or to the flood that destroyed a farmer’s crop two states away, or to the species leaving the biosphere at a rate with no parallel in recorded history. The ecological newspaper and the economics newspaper are filed in separate sections, read by separate readers, and processed in separate mental compartments by the few who read both. The business page and the science page are not reporting two different stories. They are reporting the same story in two different languages, and neither has been read carefully enough.

What Fuels the Consumption

The obvious answer to why fuel consumption is high is economic: a growing population with rising incomes wants more vehicles, more appliances, more air-conditioned space, more flight hours. This is accurate as far as it goes, which is not far enough.

Rising income explains the capacity to consume. It does not explain the compulsion. These are different things, and conflating them produces recommendations that address the first while leaving the second entirely untouched.

India has now overtaken China as the world’s largest single driver of global oil demand growth, with crude oil imports reaching a record 4.84 million barrels per day in 2024 and on track to break that record again. The country’s registered vehicle fleet, which stood at 326 million in 2020, is now approaching 400 million, with no sign of the curve flattening. The demand projection continues steeply upward through 2040, with almost no scenario in which voluntary restraint plays a meaningful role in flattening the curve, because voluntary restraint has no psychological grounding in the current citizen. The government finds itself making appeals precisely because that grounding is absent.

The connection between fuel consumption and the absence of a genuine inner life is not metaphorical. It is a mechanical chain. The human being who believes that satisfaction must be sought outward, because he has found no access to genuine sufficiency within, acts upon his emotions and desires without examining what drives them. Every desire acted upon requires energy. Energy, in a civilisation built on fossil fuels, means burning them. The citizen sitting in traffic in his third car is not simply making an economic choice. He pursues a fullness he has not found within, and does not see what he is doing. The fuel is not the cost of getting somewhere. It is the cost of the attempt.

The dispersed centre, the ego that has no fixed point of sufficiency, has scattered its search across a hundred objects simultaneously. A vehicle here, a gold purchase there, a foreign holiday, an apartment upgrade, a new phone before the old one has worn out, a flight taken not for any destination but for the proof of having gone. None of these objects resolves the insufficiency; each merely displaces it briefly. The centre is not completed by any of them, because it is not the absence of objects that has made it incomplete. It is incomplete by definition, constitutively, as the very structure of what it is to be an ego at all. The reaching does not end because the ego finds what it was reaching for. It ends only when the ego honestly sees what the reaching is and what it is not.

This is why the government’s appeal, however well-intentioned, operates against a structural headwind. It addresses a behaviour driven not by an information deficit alone but by an inner condition that information cannot directly touch. A person who has not found any genuine inner quiet will not choose less when more is available. The choosing of less requires not willpower or discipline but a genuinely different relationship to oneself, one in which the ego is not running a permanent account deficit that must be filled with purchases, with gold, with the third car, with the foreign holiday taken for the photograph rather than the place.

The suggestion that self-knowledge, commonly understood as soft and abstract, has a bearing on the current account deficit or the carbon dioxide count reads, to many, as a category error. It is not. It is precision.

Self-Knowledge as Macroeconomics

A population of people who cannot sit quietly with themselves will consume more than a population that can. This is not a moral judgment. It is a mechanical description of how inner poverty converts into outer demand. The ego that cannot find sufficiency within, reaches persistently outward, and what it reaches for must be produced somewhere, transported somehow, and fuelled by something. In the aggregate of 1.4 billion people, the inner condition of each person adds up to a macroeconomic profile and a carbon footprint. These are not separate domains. They are the same domain described in different units.

Consider what it would mean for the national accounts if a significant fraction of India’s population were genuinely not compelled by status consumption: not driven to upgrade possessions for the fleeting sense of arrival the upgrade briefly produces, not reaching for gold because the ego has borrowed gold as a stand-in for its own solidity, not flying abroad for the photograph that proves the ego was somewhere worth being. The oil import bill would be different. The current account would be different. The forex reserves would be less exposed. The rupee would face less pressure. The glacier would melt more slowly.

The objection that will be raised is that consumption reduction should not be burdened onto individuals while corporations and states produce and emit at scale. The objection has merit as political critique and none as psychological analysis. The corporation exists because the demand exists. The refinery runs because the vehicle runs. The vehicle runs because the ego runs, and the ego runs because it cannot locate a reason to stop. Address the ego honestly and the demand structure dissolves with it; address only the corporation through regulation, taxation, and policy, and demand reconstitutes supply elsewhere. This is the forty-year history of environmental policy, in which damage per unit of consumption has fallen in certain sectors while total consumption has continued to rise.

Technology offers the same partial remedy. Better engines, cleaner fuels, green hydrogen, recyclable packaging: all reduce the damage per unit of desire, but none reduces the desire. If the desire is structural, if it arises from the ego’s constitutive incompleteness rather than from the absence of a sufficiently efficient vehicle, then no technical improvement reaches its source. India is projected to increase oil consumption through at least 2040, because the growth is driven not by inefficiency but by appetite, and appetite is inner rather than mechanical in its origin.

The citizen who cannot examine what actually drives his consumption cannot restrain it, because he does not know what he would be restraining. He experiences the craving as straightforwardly natural, as a given of being alive and aspiring, no more in need of examination than hunger. He does not see that what he calls aspiration is the ego’s perpetual dissatisfaction wearing the costume of legitimate ambition. He does not see this because he has not been given the tools, because the educational systems he passed through did not provide them, because the culture he inhabits treats the examination of one’s own inner condition as either irrelevant or as a weekend supplement topic with no bearing on serious economic life.

This is the second and more serious failure the appeal reveals: not merely the failure of information, but the failure of a society to honestly know what it has already encountered and quietly set aside. The person who has read about climate change and set the article aside without allowing it to alter his habits has not failed in knowledge. He has failed in intent. He has encountered the information and chosen not to be changed by it, because being changed by it would cost something. That cost, measured in one’s own habits, is the only cost that actually matters. It is also the only one that a government appeal cannot assess or collect on anyone’s behalf.

The appeal was directed at the right behaviour for the right reasons. But an appeal to a citizen who has not been educated to examine what actually drives his behaviour, and who has not chosen to examine it even where the tools were available, is an appeal that cannot fully land. Restraint experienced as sacrifice will not persist. Restraint that arises from genuine seeing, from the honest recognition that the craving has never once delivered what it promised, does not require enforcement. It is simply the consequence of having looked honestly.

What the appeal could not say, because public discourse has not yet developed the vocabulary, is that the petrol problem and the gold problem and the current account problem and the carbon dioxide problem are not four separate failures but one: a vast population of egos running a structural deficit, reaching outward for what can only be found, if it can be found at all, in the other direction.

An economy that rests on this kind of demand carries a fragility that no forex reserve can fully buffer, no interest rate can adequately hedge, and no government appeal, however sincere and urgent, can structurally address. The appeal was necessary. In a nation genuinely awake to itself, in which citizens understand their own inner condition and its consequences, it would not have been. That gap is the real measure of the distance India has to travel, not in kilometres of pipeline or gigawatts of renewable capacity, but in the quality of what the citizen knows about himself, what he has been given the opportunity to understand, what he has been willing to honestly examine, and what no policy instrument, however well designed, can provide in his place.

If that were enough, the world’s problems would have been solved long ago.

Real change comes only when we get to the root of the rot. Reactions rarely succeed because they usually arise from the very framework that created the problem in the first place. If superficiality is the disease, then a superficial reaction cannot become the cure.

It is easy to create an Instagram page. It is easy to gather people around a common grievance. It is easy to launch a campaign, organize a protest, or start a revolution. But the important question remains: does any of that address the source of the problem?

The ego is not afraid of revolution.

The ego happily participates in revolutions.

What the ego fears is reality.

The Comfort of Blame

One of the ego’s favorite strategies is to identify an external culprit.

Everything is in a mess. Therefore, somebody else must be responsible.

The government is responsible.

The system is responsible.

The rich are responsible.

The powerful are responsible.

The institutions are responsible.

The moment the blame is successfully shifted outward, the ego experiences relief. It no longer has to look at itself.

Societies encourage this tendency because societies are made up of individuals who share the same tendency. It is not merely a political phenomenon. It is a psychological one.

The ego loves victimhood because victimhood feels like victory.

The moment one can say, “I am the victim,” one has already secured a moral triumph. Someone else becomes the offender. Someone else becomes the source of all suffering.

Unemployment, poverty, corruption, pollution, civic disorder, economic decline. The narrative becomes simple: somebody else caused all of it.

The mirror disappears.

And that is exactly what makes the narrative attractive.

The common man rarely wants a mirror. The common man wants a story.

A story in which he is innocent.

A story in which he is wronged.

A story in which somebody else is guilty.

Why Reactions Fail

This is not to deny that people feel suffocated.

Many young people are frustrated, disaffected, and searching for an outlet. Their dissatisfaction is real. Their pain is real.

But frustration alone does not produce understanding.

And without understanding, action becomes reaction.

Imagine a fan that has developed a mechanical fault and is producing an irritating noise. The noise disturbs you. Naturally, you want to eliminate it.

Suppose you decide to attack the noise itself.

You fire in all directions because the noise seems to be coming from everywhere.

Yet the actual problem is not the noise. The problem lies within the mechanism generating it.

The noise is merely a symptom.

The analogy remains incomplete because, in social life, the faulty machine is not outside us. It is within us.

The noise appears to come from outside. We hear it in governments, institutions, corporations, and systems. But much of what we perceive externally is merely a reflection of something operating internally.

The disturbance originates within, reflects outward through society, and returns to us.

Mistaking the reflection for the source, we attack everything around us.

The real culprit remains untouched.

Mirrors Before Marches

None of us likes the condition of the world.

Nobody likes corruption.

Nobody likes pollution.

Nobody likes social decay.

Nobody likes economic insecurity.

The problem is not that we dislike these conditions.

The problem is that we experience them without understanding them.

More importantly, we fail to understand our own participation in creating them.

The individual who complains about the situation is often also contributing to the situation.

That is a difficult truth because accepting it immediately creates responsibility.

And responsibility is far less attractive than rebellion.

If given a choice between responsibility and rebellion, most people instinctively choose rebellion.

Rebellion feels exciting.

Responsibility feels burdensome.

Especially in an age where rebellion has become fashionable, responsibility appears almost uncool.

Yet the question remains.

If you dislike the government, who empowers the government?

If you dislike pollution, who creates pollution?

If you dislike social conditions, who sustains those conditions?

This is not about blaming a particular individual.

No single person is responsible for the state of society.

The responsibility belongs to the collective ego that all of us participate in.

That shared blindness is the real problem.

The Illusion of Systemic Change

Because the problem is deeper than institutions, merely replacing institutions changes very little.

A government falls.

A new government emerges.

A regime collapses.

A new regime takes its place.

An institution is dismantled.

A fresh institution is constructed.

The faces change.

The names change.

The slogans change.

But the underlying consciousness remains untouched.

As long as the source remains unchanged, the outcome eventually reproduces itself.

History repeatedly demonstrates this.

There have been societies where people overthrew dictators in the name of freedom and democracy, only to later restore those same dictators through democratic processes.

The system changed.

The people did not.

Iran offers one example. Many women actively participated in the movement that removed the Shah. The regime changed. Yet what followed imposed new forms of restriction upon those very women.

What fundamentally changed?

The Russian Revolution overthrew one order only to produce another form of authoritarianism under Stalin.

Again, what fundamentally changed?

The pattern is visible across countries, cultures, and centuries.

Revolutions, rebellions, institutions, and systems mean very little when popular consciousness remains unchanged.

The Double-Edged Sword of Democracy

Even democracy cannot save an unconscious population.

Democracy is often celebrated as the solution to political problems. Yet democracy reflects the quality of the voter.

If voters are unconscious, democracy becomes a tool of manipulation.

The voter begins to invite corruption.

The voter rewards the most skilled manipulator.

The voter willingly empowers the least deserving candidate.

In such circumstances, democracy does not elevate society.

It deepens the existing blindness.

A political system can never consistently produce outcomes better than the consciousness of the people operating within it.

The Only Revolution That Matters

This leads to an answer that many find disappointingly unexciting.

The answer is education.

Not merely institutional education.

Not the education of schools, colleges, degrees, or credentials.

The education of the self.

Self-knowledge.

Self-observation.

Self-understanding.

That is where genuine transformation begins.

Without inner education, every uprising eventually becomes social entertainment.

Another episode of political drama.

The curtain falls.

The curtain rises.

The actors change.

The costumes change.

The script remains the same.

People return home feeling temporarily satisfied, convinced that history has been altered.

Then morning arrives.

The same problems persist.

The same patterns return.

The same frustrations reappear.

Because the fundamental fact remains unchanged:

the world has remained the same because we have remained the same.

Real change begins with self-knowledge.

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This contradiction raises a difficult question: can external freedom coexist with internal captivity?

The discussion began with a question about whether feminism and misogyny can coexist within the same person. The answer given was blunt: they can, because both often begin from the same assumption, that the woman is fundamentally the body.

At the point of definition, the patriarch, the misogynist, and the feminist converge. The woman is accepted as a physical identity first, and then rights, freedoms, equality, or empowerment are negotiated around that embodied identity.

The problem, it was argued, is not equality itself. Equality before law and society is necessary. Equal pay, equal access, equal protection, equal opportunity, equal civic rights, these are basic requirements of a civilized society. But equality alone cannot heal a deeper wound if the very definition of the self remains rooted in bodily identity.

That becomes freedom within the cage.

The body itself becomes the center of concern, comparison, validation, anxiety, desirability, and identity. A person may then become socially liberated while remaining psychologically imprisoned.

This contradiction appears sharply visible in many modern societies considered highly progressive. Cosmetic industries flourish. Young women undergo Botox, lip fillers, rhinoplasty, body sculpting procedures, eyelash treatments, extensions, and endless appearance optimization, often beginning in their early twenties. These practices are not confined to celebrities or elites. They have become culturally normalized.

Yet they are frequently described not as social pressure, but as empowerment.

The language surrounding them is revealing: “my body, my choice,” “I do this for myself,” “this makes me feel confident.”

But an uncomfortable question follows: where did these standards originate?

Did a child naturally arrive at these ideals of beauty, desirability, and self-worth? Or were these standards gradually absorbed from culture, media, advertising, peer behavior, entertainment systems, and centuries of conditioning?

The argument presented was that much of what modern women experience as personal preference may actually be inherited psychological programming. The traditional male gaze has not disappeared. It has been internalized. Women increasingly look at themselves through the same lens through which patriarchal culture historically viewed them.

Even women began evaluating other women through that same framework.

Once internalized deeply enough, external oppression no longer appears necessary. The system reproduces itself from within.

This creates a peculiar form of modern bondage. Nobody appears to be forcing anything. No authority visibly imposes the standards. The individual voluntarily participates in them while calling the participation freedom.

And because the system now speaks in the language of autonomy, criticism becomes difficult. The person sincerely believes the desire is original.

But the consequences appear everywhere.

In many highly progressive societies, women report disproportionately high rates of anxiety, stress disorders, antidepressant usage, body dissatisfaction, loneliness, and psychological instability. The phenomenon has even generated what researchers sometimes call the “female happiness paradox,” where objective social gains have not translated into increased subjective well-being.

The contradiction extends further.

Some conservative societies produce significantly higher female participation in STEM education than countries celebrated globally for gender equality. In places considered deeply liberated, female enrollment in technical and professional fields has sometimes declined sharply, with many women framing withdrawal itself as an expression of personal freedom.

This raises another difficult question: are people freely choosing, or are inherited psychological structures quietly choosing through them?

The discussion repeatedly returned to one central distinction, the difference between the body and the one who says “I.”

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Who is the sufferer?

When people say women have suffered historically, what exactly has suffered? Certainly the body has suffered in countless cases through violence, assault, exploitation, and abuse. But much suffering has also existed even when the body was materially comfortable.

A woman could be physically protected, richly clothed, medically cared for, and socially privileged, yet remain deeply unfree.

This suggests that suffering does not belong merely to the body. The deeper wound exists at the level of consciousness, identity, and conditioning.

Modern discourse, however, often continues treating the woman primarily as a physical category. The body remains central to conversation, politics, fashion, sexuality, desirability, and identity.

As long as identity remains trapped there, liberation remains partial.

This perspective also reframes many modern cultural phenomena.

The obsession with aging, desirability, fertility timelines, relationship anxiety, and bodily preservation reflects not liberation from patriarchal values, but continued dependence on them. Terms like “hitting the wall,” fear of losing attractiveness, panic around aging, and compulsive beauty maintenance reveal how deeply female worth remains psychologically tied to bodily valuation.

The wound, it was argued, is centuries deep. Superficial slogans cannot heal it.

External reforms are necessary but insufficient.

Safety laws matter. Equal rights matter. Legal protection matters. Economic independence matters. But inner conditioning can survive all institutional progress.

A person may gain freedom socially while remaining psychologically colonized.

This internalization becomes visible even in language and culture. Women often use the same abusive vocabulary historically invented by men to degrade women. They replicate standards, expectations, and judgments originally imposed upon them. Mothers may perpetuate restrictive expectations upon daughters. Women may police each other’s appearance, sexuality, desirability, and conformity.

At that point, oppression no longer requires an active oppressor.

The structure sustains itself internally.

The discussion then moved toward one of its strongest claims: the modern woman often does not yet know what life as a fully independent human being actually looks like outside inherited gender conditioning.

Historically, women were not merely controlled physically.

Entire concepts of femininity, beauty, domesticity, desirability, emotional identity, motherhood, attachment, and social value were constructed around reproductive and sexual utility.

These concepts eventually became normalized so deeply that they now feel natural.

But conditioning repeated across centuries can begin to feel like instinct.

This creates fear around genuine liberation. Rejecting superficial restrictions is easier than rejecting inherited psychological identity itself. A person can reject one aspect of tradition while retaining the deeper framework beneath it.

That is why partial rebellion often becomes comfortable.

The conversation criticized forms of feminism that seek equality with structures built by the same civilization that psychologically damaged women in the first place. Equality, while necessary, cannot itself become the ultimate destination if the underlying framework remains unquestioned.

A woman becoming equal within a psychologically distorted system does not automatically become inwardly free.

The discussion later turned toward sexuality, clothing, and movements like “Free the Nipple.”

The argument presented was nuanced. There is nothing inherently obscene about the female body. Human societies across history have existed with vastly different norms around clothing and exposure. In some cultures, minimal clothing carried no sexual charge at all.

The issue, therefore, is not nudity itself.

The issue is consciousness.

If bodily exposure emerges from inward freedom, then clothing becomes irrelevant. A person may wear much or little without psychological dependence attached to either choice.

But if the body remains psychologically central, then even acts presented as liberation may remain trapped inside the same old framework of bodily validation, comparison, attention, desirability, and sexual identity.

In that case, the nipple may become free while the mind remains imprisoned.

The distinction is subtle but fundamental.

Bondage does not primarily exist in clothes. Bondage exists in consciousness.

A prisoner running naked inside a jail remains imprisoned.

This line of thought also extended to modern social interactions between men and women. Increasing legal caution, workplace sensitivity training, and anxiety around gender interaction were interpreted as symptoms of a civilization still unable to encounter each other simply as human beings first.

The argument was not against legal protections or workplace safeguards. Rather, it questioned why interaction itself has become psychologically loaded to such an extent.

The deeper implication was that both men and women increasingly encounter each other first through gendered identities rather than shared humanity.

That distortion affects intimacy, friendship, conversation, attraction, work, and trust.

One of the most striking observations came near the end: psychological domination becomes complete when the oppressed begin speaking the language of the oppressor voluntarily.

At that stage, no visible oppressor remains necessary.

The system sustains itself internally, culturally, emotionally, commercially, aesthetically, and psychologically.

The proposed solution was radical rejection, not merely of particular social restrictions, but of inherited psychological conditioning itself.

Not hatred toward men.

Not superficial rebellion.

Not role reversal.

Not performative empowerment.

But a movement from gender-first identity toward human consciousness first.

The final claim was simple but severe:

She need not strive to be ‘more woman.’

She must first be free to be fully human.

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That model is mistaken!

If something is truly important to you, then the other things do not need to be forcibly sacrificed. They lose their value by comparison. They quietly fall away. The very fact that you experience your commitment as sacrifice usually means that your relation to the goal is still weak. You are still dividing life into separate inventories of value, as though one could add up sixty units here, forty units there, and then deliberately choose one pile while lamenting the rest. Life does not work that way. Business may work that way. Life does not.

In life, the real question is not whether you are balanced or goal-oriented. The real question is whether you have actually recognized the worth of what you are pursuing. If you have, then the rest does not remain as a competing burden. It reorganizes itself. What is needed for the pursuit stays, but it stays in an aligned form. Even the ordinary things of life, your body, your health, your exercise, your routine, remain, but now they serve the center. They are no longer distractions from the center.

That is why the word sacrifice is misleading. Sacrifice still implies that the thing given up had value. But if you have seen clearly, then many things do not need to be renounced with pain. They simply cease to matter in the same way. They evaporate. They are ignored because they are no longer experienced as valuable.

This also changes the way one should think about flexibility. Flexibility belongs in the means, not in the end. If the destination is truly clear, then the route can change. One can take one road or another, depending on what is available. But the object of love itself cannot be flexible. You cannot love something at forty percent and something else at thirty percent and still pretend that this is love. Love is absolute. It is not fractional.

And that absolute is not some distant ideal. When a person looks honestly within, what is needed most deeply is not something private in the small sense. It is not merely an individual preference. What is truly needed by the self is also what the wider world needs. That is why the pursuit is not selfish. If you come to know what you really need, then pursue it without guilt. Pursue it fully. Be ruthless about clearing away what does not belong. If one route is blocked, take another. The method may change. The center must not.

The same logic applies to the supposed divide between helping yourself and helping others.

People often imagine that life contains two separate tracks. On one track is personal fulfillment, celebration, art, play, inward joy. On the other track is social contribution, service, usefulness, duty. Once this division is accepted, conflict begins. If you spend time in your own joy, you feel guilty, as though you are neglecting the suffering of the world. If you rush into service, you begin to feel that you have abandoned your own life. The result is a split mind.

That split should be erased.

What is good for you, if it is truly good, will also be good for others. The two are not fundamentally different. When personal life and professional life are treated as separate compartments, life becomes strained and artificial. What should have been celebration is then called absenteeism. What should have been inward care is then seen as irresponsibility. The very structure of the modern mind creates a false contradiction where none need exist.

A more integrated life is possible. In that life, what you do for yourself is not separate from what you do for others. Self-love and social work cease to be opposing categories. They become one body. When you are really moving in the right direction inwardly, it becomes difficult to separate your own good from the good of the whole. Helping others is no longer a moral add-on. It is evidence that you have found the right center.

This is also why the talk of freedom needs scrutiny.

Young people often believe they are free. Outwardly, they have more options than previous generations. They can choose their clothes, their language, their posture, their public identity. They can declare independence in the tone of their speech and in the design of their self-presentation. But outward freedom can coexist with inward bondage. In fact, it often does.

A person may loudly defend freedom while still carrying deep fear, confusion, lust, and insecurity. The costume changes. The center does not. What is called freedom in such a case is only performative freedom. It is freedom worn as style. It is bondage wearing new clothes.

Real freedom begins inside. Before one performs freedom externally, one must look honestly at what binds the mind internally. Once those inner bondages are seen clearly, they begin to lose their hold. Freedom is not the ability to do anything whatsoever. Freedom is the inward condition in which one is no longer ruled by compulsions disguised as choice.

The same inward honesty is needed when comparing yourself with others.

Comparison is not optional. It is built into human life, because life is a movement from one condition to another. The problem is that most people compare on the wrong axis. They compare themselves socially, externally, horizontally. Someone else got an internship. Someone else got a certificate. Someone else appears more advanced. And then the mind concludes that it is behind.

That is the wrong measurement.

The real comparison must be between where you were and where you are now. Life is meant to rise inwardly. External movement is only meaningful if it corresponds to internal ascension. The x-axis may expand dramatically while the y-axis remains unchanged. A person may become busier, more visible, more accomplished, more socially extended, and yet remain exactly where they were inwardly. Worse, the inward position may actually decline.

That is the wastage most people never notice. They think they have moved far because their external coordinates have changed. But if the inner coordinate has not risen, then nothing essential has happened. A life can appear enlarged and still be spiritually flat. It can appear successful and still be empty. It can even become negative, because all the outward motion has purchased nothing inwardly.

So the proper question is not, how much have I accumulated? The proper question is, where is my inner position now compared to where it was before? Have I risen? Has there been actual ascent? If the answer is no, then all the movement has been cosmetic.

A meaningful life, then, is not one of divided loyalties. It is not a life of sacrifice in the crude sense, nor a life split between self and society, nor a life of performative freedom, nor a life measured by external comparison. It is a life in which the center is known clearly enough that the rest arranges itself around it. It is a life in which the inward and outward are not enemies. It is a life in which movement on the outside serves ascent on the inside.

That is the only useful measure.

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The ego.

That is the real voter.

The rest is decoration.

In recent elections across India, familiar political certainties collapsed. In West Bengal, a government long considered unshakeable lost power. In Tamil Nadu, a political culture dominated for decades by one binary suddenly tilted toward a newer face. Kerala witnessed another turn. Elsewhere too, the electorate appeared restless, volatile, eager for replacement.

The immediate temptation is to interpret all this as democratic awakening. But that interpretation grants far too much depth to what is often a very shallow movement.

The ego remains the ego. It merely changes objects.

People say the masses are demanding change. But what kind of change? Has there been any fundamental shift in consciousness? Have voters suddenly become more self-aware, more truthful, less fearful, less divisive, less greedy?

Or have they merely become bored?

That is the more uncomfortable possibility.

The ego cannot tolerate stillness. It constantly seeks novelty because it is fundamentally dissatisfied with itself. But instead of confronting its own emptiness, it keeps replacing external objects. One government is replaced with another. One party with another. One leader with another. One ideology with another. The mechanism remains identical.

In Tamil Nadu, for decades, politics revolved around a familiar ideological and cultural axis. If ideological commitment were truly deep, things would not swing so suddenly. Abrupt transitions reveal something important: attachment was never really to principles. It was to image, personality, spectacle.

A more attractive face emerged. The crowd moved.

This is not mass enlightenment. It is collective restlessness.

The same pattern has repeated everywhere. West Bengal moved from decades of communist rule to another dispensation, and many who once represented one ideology comfortably migrated into another. Assam saw long Congress dominance before shifting elsewhere. Tomorrow it may shift again.

Nothing extraordinary is happening. The ego is merely changing toys.

What is commonly called anti-incumbency is often only boredom masquerading as political consciousness.

The media may frame such moments as democratic maturity, but that interpretation attributes immense seriousness to movements that are frequently impulsive, emotional, image-driven, and deeply superficial. The electorate is not necessarily disappointed. More often, it is simply fatigued with familiarity.

And the ego mistakes fatigue for insight.

image courtesy: The Indian Express

The Marketplace of Faces

This becomes especially visible in societies where film stars move effortlessly into political office.

Many see this as a failure of democracy. But perhaps it only reveals democracy honestly.

In some regions, the actor openly becomes the politician. Elsewhere, the politician remains an actor while pretending not to be one.

Politics today is largely the management of image. The masses rarely know the individual behind the persona, nor do they seriously attempt to know. They respond to projection, to screens, sounds, slogans, performances, gestures, carefully manufactured charisma.

The electorate purchases faces.

The candidate who performs best before cameras often succeeds more than the one who governs best in office.

But this reflects something deeper than political manipulation. Politicians merely supply what the public already demands. They are marketers responding to the psychology of the masses.

And the psychology of the masses reflects the psychology of the individual.

Just as most people possess only superficial knowledge of themselves, they also engage superficially with public life. A society incapable of authenticity in private existence cannot suddenly become deeply perceptive in political judgment.

The public spectacle merely mirrors inner shallowness.

Perhaps this is why celebrity politics succeeds so easily. If everything has already become performance, why not elect professional performers?

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Violence Does Not Begin After Elections

Whenever elections conclude, another familiar phrase appears: post-poll violence.

But violence did not begin after the polls.

Violence was already present throughout.

The ego itself is violence.

The ego exists through separation, me versus you, my group versus yours, my interest versus yours. Wherever separation dominates consciousness, violence becomes inevitable. Sometimes that violence remains hidden because concealment serves the ego better. Sometimes it becomes visible because open aggression proves more useful.

But it is always there.

The problem is that violence is usually defined too narrowly. If no bullets are fired, if no buildings burn, people assume peace exists.

Yet what about promises deliberately designed to manipulate insecurity and desire? What about votes exchanged for freebies? What about caste calculations, religious mobilization, fear-based campaigning, tribal loyalties?

What about the quiet psychological exploitation embedded within electoral systems themselves?

Violence does not suddenly erupt after results. Results merely expose what was already active beneath the surface.

As long as the ego remains dominant, violence remains eternal.

Attempts to externally suppress violence repeatedly fail because they refuse to address its source. One tries to control symptoms while protecting the disease itself.

Democracy and the Luxury of Victimhood

In democratic societies, citizens often blame governments as if governments descend mysteriously from the sky.

But governments emerge from the consciousness of the people who elect them.

Still, the ego enjoys victimhood. Victimhood is pleasurable because it removes responsibility. “Circumstances made me this way.” “The system is corrupt.” “The politicians are the problem.”

Such thinking allows the individual to avoid self-examination.

If consciousness is viewed as entirely determined by history, class, or external conditions, then personal responsibility disappears conveniently. One no longer needs to ask difficult questions inwardly.

The ego finds comfort there.

But no meaningful social transformation is possible without individual transformation. A society is not an abstract entity floating above human beings. Society is the aggregate expression of countless individual minds.

The disorder outside reflects disorder within.

People often speak passionately about saving democracy while remaining deeply dishonest in personal life. They speak of justice while living through fear, imitation, comparison, and opportunism. They condemn corruption publicly while privately worshipping advantage.

Then they wonder why political systems deteriorate.

Why Politics Cannot Solve Climate Catastrophe

Even supposedly intellectual political formations rarely confront the deepest issues honestly.

Take climate catastrophe.

Why is it discussed so inadequately across ideological lines?

Because a serious discussion on climate would require confronting the real source of ecological destruction: ego itself.

Not merely capitalist ego. Not merely bourgeois ego. Ego.

The endless urge to consume, dominate, expand, possess, display, compete, these are not merely economic tendencies. They are psychological tendencies. Environmental destruction is ultimately an outward projection of inward disorder.

But manifestos themselves are egoic instruments. Why would the ego draft its own obituary?

This is why neither Left nor Right reaches the root.

The ego can wear any ideological costume.

It can become socialist, capitalist, nationalist, progressive, conservative, revolutionary, religious, secular. The costume changes; the center remains intact.

And therefore political revolutions repeatedly fail to produce fundamental human transformation.

The Courage to Stand Alone

At the center of democratic failure lies a deeper human failure: the inability to stand alone.

Many people privately recognize who is more honest, more capable, more thoughtful. Yet they refuse to support such individuals because they fear “wasting” their vote.

The crowd becomes the criterion for truth.

But truth has never depended on numbers.

Love demands the courage to stand alone. If one genuinely sees something as right, one must move with it irrespective of majority opinion, prediction markets, social pressure, or electoral calculations.

Without self-knowledge there is no love. And without love there is dependence on crowds.

This dependence extends far beyond politics. It shapes careers, relationships, morality, spirituality, ambition, identity. People imitate because inwardly they remain uncertain, fragmented, afraid.

And then they expect collective intelligence from a crowd composed of inwardly confused individuals.

Real revolutions do not belong to crowds. Crowds can amplify momentum, but transformation begins elsewhere, in the individual heart, in sincerity, in the refusal to continue living falsely.

Without that, changing governments becomes merely psychological consolation.

What Actually Needs to Change

The world does not primarily need another political revolution.

It needs insight.

It needs honesty.

It needs the courage to see the falseness operating within oneself and to let it go.

Not sentimental love. Not ideological fervor. Not emotional nationalism. Not performative activism.

A deeper courage.

Otherwise, elections will continue generating temporary excitement followed by predictable disappointment. Faces will change. Slogans will change. Alliances will change. The electorate will celebrate each new beginning as historic.

And yet the fundamental structure of suffering will remain untouched.

Because the voter never truly changed.

The ego merely found a new mask.

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That astonishment is not innocence. It is the ego’s preferred method of self-protection: to locate the problem at a sufficient distance that no self-examination becomes necessary. To be shocked is to be excused.

A 2023 LinkedIn survey found that seventy percent of working women in India report experiencing sexual hostility at the workplace, not harassment in its legal, actionable form, but the ambient condition of predation operating just below the threshold of complaint. India has approximately three crore working women, already a reflection of one of the lowest female labour force participation rates among large economies at just above thirty-five percent against a global average of fifty-two. In a recent year, complaints filed under POSH across the private listed sector numbered under three thousand, extended at most to twenty thousand when the public sector is included. Against three crore women reporting hostility, this is the voice of less than one tenth of one percent. What this produces is not a portrait of a mechanism that failed but a portrait of a society that has trained its women to absorb and continue. The Nashik case reached the surface after four years and eight voices too loud to ignore, and the country responded as though it had never encountered anything like this before. That response is not a sign of health. It is a symptom, and it belongs to the same condition that produced the events themselves.

The Architecture We Built

The instinct, once the noise began, was to locate the failure in the institution: POSH existed but was not enforced, committees were in place but compromised, emails were sent and ignored, a woman occupied the HR position and still chose suppression over accountability. The inference drawn was procedural: the framework was adequate, but the execution was deficient, so the remedy is stricter enforcement. This is the kind of conclusion that generates the most visible action while disturbing the least possible ground, which is precisely why it will not reach the problem.

The problem indeed is structural, but the structure is not located in the Human Resources department of a Nashik call centre. It is located in what this society has, collectively and with considerable comfort, agreed to call normal.

Consider what surrounds us without controversy. Films are celebrated for their earnings, and the earnings frequently track the density of sexualised content, with no discomfort registered on any editorial page. Matrimonial advertisements describe women in the language of a commodities listing; complexion, height, build, the precise calibration of appearance required, published without remark in the same newspapers that will later carry opinion pieces on gender equity. Jewellery campaigns dress their subject in a manner designed to ensure the product is the last thing registered; the formula is so established that no one thinks to question it. Wedding celebrations, held among people who would describe themselves as respectable, have become competitive spectacles in which the sexualisation of the body is a feature rather than an aberration, and the women of the household participate with evident enthusiasm. The sidebar of the respectable news website carries, beneath the serious reporting, a rotating catalogue of wardrobe malfunctions and beach photographs; the traffic data confirms this is what most visitors came for.

None of this is hidden, nor does anyone find it unusual. All of it is seemingly ordinary, and the people who produce it, consume it, and transmit it to their children are the same people who travel to offices and call centres and sit across from one another in performance reviews. The ego that learns at home, at the cinema, at the wedding reception, to process the female body as a site of display, negotiation, and transaction does not relearn itself at the office entrance. It is the only self it carries; it arrives already formed.

There is a further dimension the outrage has been careful not to linger on. The women who remained in that workplace for four years did so because the career was the calculation: the income, the identity built around the income, the weighing of what leaving would cost against what staying cost, and staying won. The formation that produces this calculation begins long before the first salary slip. It teaches a person that economic participation is the primary measure of worth, that its price is to be absorbed in silence, and that the person who refuses is the one creating the problem. When a society’s education, formal and informal, in classrooms and in households, reduces a person to their productivity and their productivity to their compliance, the conditions for exploitation are established before the exploiter enters the room. She inherits them.

The Wound Is Not Where We Are Searching

Three elements converged in Nashik, and each is worth naming precisely because none is accidental. The first was sexual predation: the ego in its most legible mode, turning another person’s body into an instrument for the relief of its own restlessness, reaching for what is available because it does not know what it actually needs. The second was institutional complicity: the same ego operating through hierarchy, protecting its position by protecting the abuser, treating a woman’s sustained complaint as a threat to be managed rather than a truth requiring response. The third involved the use of religious identity as a mechanism of coercion, and here the principle extends well beyond the specific facts of this case.

Religion, as it functions in the life of the un-inquired ego, is not an inward path; it is an outward banner. It takes the ego’s incompleteness and organises it at collective scale: my group, my numbers, my territory, my expansion. The impulse to convert by coercion or manipulation is not devotional; it is demographic. The logic is ancient and straightforward: I do not know who I am, but I know how many of us there are, and larger feels safer. When religion is reduced to this, to identity, headcount, the organised pressure of the incomplete against the incomplete, then whatever serves the expansion of numbers will feel justified regardless of means. This structure belongs to no single tradition. It appears wherever the ego is handed a religious vocabulary without any corresponding invitation to examine itself, which is to say it appears nearly everywhere.

The three elements share a single root, and it is not a policy failure. It is the uninquired ego: the self that has never been required, by its education, its household, or its religion, to turn and look honestly at what it is.

POSH will not reach that root, because POSH addresses behaviour, and behaviour is downstream of formation. The formation happens before the first performance review, before the first HR induction, in the household that defines a daughter’s worth by her marriageability, in the child absorbing from everything around him that bodies are objects to be ranked and appropriated, in the person raised inside a religion that was never offered as a path of self-inquiry but only as an identity to be defended and enlarged. What arrives at the office has been built over years by forces no committee retroactively reaches. Cut one tree from this soil and three grow back. The soil itself has never been the subject of serious examination.

The Bhagavad Gita does not prescribe a new committee. It asks, before anything else, whether the person who will act has examined who they are. Nishkaam karma, action without attachment to outcome, is not passivity; it is the specific courage to refuse what is being offered as normal, to resist without first calculating whether the resistance is convenient, to act from honest reckoning rather than waiting for the permission of circumstance. Mahatma Gandhi had no material leverage over the most powerful empire of his era; he had only the refusal, maintained without compromise, to accept as legitimate what the machinery of power insisted was legitimate. The Gita calls this swadharma, fidelity to one’s own truth, and holds it preferable to any degree of comfort purchased by surrendering it.

The women who finally spoke exercised exactly that refusal. The question the rest of us are being offered by the fact of our own astonishment is simpler and harder than anything a policy review will ask: why were we surprised by something we already knew? That question does not live in a governance report. It lives in whatever we have been willing to call normal, which is to say it lives in us. The noise will subside, but the formation that made the noise necessary will continue, until the one thing that has never been seriously attempted is finally attempted: the honest examination of the one who is shocked.

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This April, nearly every city on the list of the world’s hundred hottest was Indian. On certain days the figure was the entire hundred. Varanasi is burning at forty-four degrees. Prayagraj, which we call a seat of the divine, is a furnace. Simultaneously, the Char Dham yatra has begun, and hundreds of thousands of vehicles are winding up the roads toward Gangotri and Kedarnath, carrying pilgrims and tourists and the merely restless, each one of them eating, discarding, emitting, turning the Himalayas into an extension of the plains they left behind. We call these cities devbhoomi, sacred ground. What we do not ask is what it means that the sacred ground is on fire, and who precisely lit the match.

The standard account of why the planet is heating runs through science, and the science is correct as far as it goes: excess carbon dioxide and its equivalent greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, trap excess heat that would otherwise radiate back into space, and the concentrated warmth produces the now-familiar cascade of consequences, floods, droughts, glacier retreat, marine acidification, and a brutally simple arithmetic in which every fraction of a degree makes the next fraction easier to reach. That account is accurate. It is also, by itself, almost entirely useless, because it tells us what is happening without telling us why the human species keeps doing it when the consequences are this legible. The science ends at the atmosphere. What produced the atmosphere’s problem is older and less visible: a consistent human refusal to count the full cost of wanting things. That refusal has a structure, and the structure is economic before it is psychological, though it is both.

The Fraud in the Price Tag

The answer most consistently avoided is this: everything is priced incorrectly, and has been for as long as industrial civilisation has existed.

Consider what a litre of petrol actually is. It is the compressed residue of organic matter that took a hundred million years to form under specific geological conditions that cannot be replicated, accelerated, or substituted. That process happened once, over timescales the human imagination cannot sincerely hold. We extracted the majority of the accessible reserves in under two hundred years, with the bulk of the extraction occurring in the last fifty. And then we priced it. We said it costs a hundred rupees per litre, or six dollars a gallon, or whatever the market settled on after accounting for extraction cost, refining, distribution, and a modest tax. What the price did not include, and has never included, is the cost of making the thing in the first place, because the planet made it for free, across geological time, and sent no invoice. So we collected the resource at the extraction cost and called the difference profit, called the consumption affordable, called the scale of it development. This is not economics; it is a sophisticated form of theft with the ledger arranged so that the victim cannot file a claim.

The same structure operates at every scale. Consider a company that runs its operations at the edge of a forest, clearing what it needs, drawing from the watershed as though the watershed were an asset on its own balance sheet, and dumping what it produces into the air and soil. At the end of the year, it records a profit. The profit is real in the accounting; what is missing is the corresponding entry, the column that would record the damage done to produce it. A company that earns a thousand rupees in profit while inflicting a hundred thousand rupees of ecological damage has not earned a thousand rupees; it has lost ninety-nine thousand, with the loss arranged to fall on an entity that sends no invoice and attends no board meeting. Every corporate earnings report conceals this entry. Every GDP growth figure relies upon concealing it. Recent research on the world’s publicly listed companies in 2021 alone places their unpriced environmental cost at roughly $3.71 trillion, equivalent to more than four percent of global GDP, none of which appears on any balance sheet because the column for it has never been drawn.

The forty or fifty-rupee Maggi that we get on the mountains is the same structure at domestic scale. The plastic in that packet will remain in the mountain ecosystem for centuries. The ecological damage of a single packet, fully priced across its lifecycle, runs to thousands of rupees. But the damage lands in the mountain’s account, not the consumer’s. The consumer pays fifty rupees and walks away feeling that the transaction is complete. It is not complete, and will never be complete, because the mountain cannot present a bill, and the market has been organised specifically to ensure that no one presents one on its behalf.

The food on our plates runs on the same principle. Recent estimates from the United Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation place the true environmental cost of the global food system at roughly $29 trillion annually, against a market price of around $9 trillion. The food is sold at one-third of what it costs the planet to produce. Energy is subsidised. Fertiliser is subsidised. Animal-flesh products are particularly heavily subsidised, in nearly every country that produces them. None of these subsidies is being paid by some other set of human beings to whom the burden has been transferred. They are being paid by forests, aquifers, soil, and atmospheric stability, none of which can withhold supply or raise rates, and all of which are being drawn down at a velocity that the accounting system was designed not to record.

This is why consumption is high: not because human beings are uniquely depraved, not because this generation is more careless than previous ones, but because the price signal systematically lies. When the real cost of an activity is hidden from the person undertaking it, that person will undertake more of it than they would if they saw the full figure. This is not a moral observation; it is basic economic logic, applied to an entity, the natural world, that has been deliberately kept off the books.

The Colonial Accounting

There is a useful analogy here, drawn not from theory but from a history this country knows well.

Britain occupied India for close to two centuries and extracted what economists now estimate at forty-five trillion dollars in resources and labour, at current exchange rates, through trade arrangements that were structured as commerce and functioned as organised looting. Indigo, cotton, jute, spices, timber, the enormous surplus of Bengal’s weavers and Bihar’s farmers and the plains of Punjab: all of it moved outward, while a narrative of civilisational improvement moved inward. The British citizen of 1900s was among the wealthiest people on earth. He paid low prices for imported goods, wore inexpensive cotton, drank cheap tea, and understood his prosperity as the reward of industry and national character. What he did not include in his accounting was the cost to the entity from which his prosperity was drawn. India’s ruination did not appear in his balance sheet. Britain and India were, in his moral arithmetic, two separate entities, and the damage to one was simply not a charge against the other.

The arrangement did not end with Independence; it merely changed coordinates. Walk into any Apple store in Manhattan or Munich and pick up a device that retails for a thousand dollars. The components were assembled in Shenzhen and Chennai, the rare earths were dug out of Congolese soil by labour that bears no resemblance to anything called employment, the assembly hours were logged in dormitories where the workers earn in a year what the consumer earns in a fortnight, and the device’s environmental footprint was assigned to whichever territory had the weakest enforcement. If the labour at every stage had been priced at the rate the citizens of Manhattan or Munich would demand for themselves, the device would not cost a thousand dollars; it would cost two and a half thousand, and the household that currently owns three of its cousins would own one. The cheapness is not the result of efficient logistics or design genius. It is the result of arrangements that keep the producing geographies poor enough to keep the consuming geographies stocked. The colonial structure has been redrawn on a different map; the consumer at its terminal end is still under the impression that he has earned what he holds.

The logic of the arrangement, then and now, is identical to the logic governing humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Economists who have attempted to account for the last two hundred years of industrial progress have reached a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: roughly one-third of what we call progress can be attributed to human ingenuity, genuine innovation, the organisation of labour, and the real accumulation of knowledge. The remaining two-thirds is the product of two things: the exploitation of colonised peoples and territories, and the extraction of natural capital that belonged to no one in particular and was therefore charged to no one at all. We counted both as income, and neither was income. One was looting, and the other was selling the inheritance.

Natural capital, the aggregate of forests, rivers, fisheries, aquifers, topsoil, and the atmospheric stability that makes agriculture possible, has been drawn down at a rate the WWF’s Living Planet Index captures in one figure: a 73 percent average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970, wildlife being among the most reliable proxies for the health of the systems that sustain all life. The GDP figures for those same five decades show consistent growth. Both statistics are accurate, and their combination reveals the deception: we consumed the capital and recorded the consumption as revenue. Any accountant shown this methodology would call it fraud. We call it the global economy. Selling the family silver, in any other context, is what one calls a household that has run out of every other option; we are doing it as a species while celebrating the receipts.

The Same Hand That Refuses to Strike Its Own

There is a feature of the colonial story that is worth pausing on, because it shows the precise mechanism by which the accounting becomes possible.

The British supervisor at a Calcutta jute factory could whip a Bengali worker into longer hours and call it productivity. He could not, and would not, whip a fellow Briton, because such an act would register, in his moral apparatus, as violence against a person. The Bengali was not, in the same sense, a person to him. The British administrator could ship opium into Chinese ports for two generations, knowing precisely what addiction does to families, and continue the trade as commerce. He would not have done the same thing to the children of his own household. The British corporation could clear forests in territories it had decided were available for clearing. It could not have proposed to clear the woodland behind its director’s country house. The same human being, capable of restraint and decency in one direction, was capable of unbroken cruelty in another, and the boundary between the two was the boundary between what he counted as himself and what he counted as not himself.

This is the engine. This is what made the accounting feel honest to him. The damage was real, was visible, was even reported in his own newspapers, and yet did not register as damage to him, because the entity sustaining the damage had been categorised, in some pre-rational layer of his self-understanding, as outside the territory in which his moral arithmetic operated. The cruelty was not invisible. The cruelty’s relevance to him was invisible, and that is a different and more durable form of concealment.

The ordinary consumer of today operates by precisely the same mechanism, with the boundary redrawn one position outward. He would not burn down a tree in his own front yard to heat his living room; he is comfortable purchasing furniture made from a forest he has never seen and will not visit. He would not pour industrial effluent into the well from which his children drink; he is comfortable wearing fast fashion produced beside a river that has been declared dead. He would not, faced with the prospect, set fire to his own lungs; he watched, on a screen, the Amazon burn for weeks, and ordered another delivery the same evening. The pattern is not callousness, exactly. It is the same selective vision the Briton of 1900 brought to his ledger: the harm is acknowledged in principle and subtracted from the relevant column in practice, because the column in question has been drawn around a self that does not include the forest, the river, or the species being subtracted.

What we are seeing in the climate data is the bill arriving for an arrangement that has run on this selective vision for two hundred years. We are not getting richer. We are spending down a natural inheritance accumulated over geological time, entering the draw-down in the growth column, and refusing to note the corresponding reduction in assets. The net position is deteriorating, and the growth figure is a fiction. Selling one’s mother’s saris and calling the proceeds a salary is a known indicator of household ruin; we are doing it at planetary scale and printing the receipts as quarterly results.

There is one further consequence of this accounting failure that deserves to be named, because it is frequently mistaken for an argument against the crisis. When economists warn that unchecked climate change will inflict severe losses on global GDP, they present this as a reason to act. India alone is projected to lose roughly $150 billion in productivity annually to extreme heat, with potential GDP losses approaching nine percent by mid-century if no intervention is mounted. What such projections quietly assume is that GDP growth, the very metric being defended, is a thing worth defending. They are not examining the obvious: GDP growth, pursued as the central objective of modern economies, is the engine producing the crisis. To protect the metric that drove the destruction by pointing to the destruction’s cost is not a solution; it is the justification for accelerating the thing that needs to stop.

The Deceptions Called Solutions

Once the pricing problem is visible, the inadequacy of every currently fashionable response becomes equally visible, because every response is designed to address the symptom rather than the structure.

Carbon credit markets, to take the most prominent example, are an accounting manoeuvre rather than an environmental intervention. The theory is that if a company offsets its emissions by funding a carbon sequestration project elsewhere, the net atmospheric impact is neutral. The practice is that the sequestration projects are routinely overvalued, the additionality of their carbon capture is routinely unverified, and the company’s actual emissions continue unchanged. This is not a failure of implementation that better regulation would correct; it is what happens when an accounting trick is substituted for a behavioural change. The ledger looks cleaner; the atmosphere receives the same quantity of carbon it would have received in the absence of the scheme. We have proposed, in effect, to clean the planet using a machine that itself runs on the same fuel, and announced this as innovation.

The automobile industry offers a more revealing example, because its history is long enough to show the pattern clearly. Every significant improvement in fuel efficiency over the last century has been followed by an increase in total fuel consumption, not a decrease, because cheaper operation lowered the threshold for use, expanded the range of applications, and made the market for vehicles larger. A study of a hundred years of automotive efficiency improvements shows the same result each time: the per-vehicle emissions fell, the number of vehicles rose faster, and total emissions increased. The electric vehicle is positioned as the resolution of this problem, but it operates by the same logic. It reduces per-vehicle emissions by a meaningful margin, the improvement is real, and then it makes electric mobility morally comfortable and economically cheaper, which accelerates the aspiration to vehicle ownership in every market that has not yet reached saturation. India currently has roughly thirty-four cars per thousand people; the United States has more than 850. That gap is understood, by every party with an interest in understanding it, as a market opportunity. The EV makes the closure of that gap environmentally presentable. Whether it makes it environmentally sustainable depends entirely on a second variable that the EV cannot address: total fleet size, which is driven not by the efficiency of any battery but by the ego’s demand to insulate itself, to arrive, to make its separateness legible to the world in steel and motion. Subsidise the EV, lower the cost per kilometre, and the household that had one car parks three. The efficiency gain is consumed by the appetite it was supposed to constrain.

This pattern, observed first in coal engines by the economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865, holds across every domain where a more efficient instrument has been offered to an unchanged ego. The ego does not self-limit through efficiency; efficiency was always the ego’s instrument, never its corrective. Lower the cost of consumption and the ego will consume more, because the wanting was the engine, and the engine has not been touched.

The structural limit of pricing reform, much discussed in policy circles, is also worth naming directly. Pricing is set by governments, and democratic governments cannot price meaningfully against the wishes of their own electorates. A government that imposed the actual ecological cost of food, fuel, and air travel on its citizens would face the next election as a cautionary tale. This is not a flaw in any particular leader; it is a structural fact about systems in which the cost-bearer and the vote-caster are the same person. Eco-taxes, fair pricing, green labelling, all of these belong in the toolkit. None of them constitutes the answer, because the answer requires a kind of restraint that a vote-seeking government cannot install in a population that has not already chosen it.

There is a driver of emissions that the debate avoids even more consistently than any of these, because naming it plainly requires confronting something that no government, no religion, and no development economist will willingly address. Every human being, simply by existing, is a unit of emission, not by moral failing but by the plain physics of living: food must be grown, water must be lifted, energy must be generated, and space must be cleared. Conservative ecological estimates place the planet’s sustainable carrying capacity, at current consumption norms, at three to four billion people. The more demanding estimates place it lower still, at two to two and a half billion. The current population is over eight billion, more than double the absorbable load by the generous estimate, and the projection points toward ten to eleven billion before any peak. No green technology operates on a denominator this large and produces a sustainable quotient.

The reason the population question is avoided is not that it is unanswerable; it is that the answer touches a culture that very few people are prepared to examine. Population growth runs on appetite, not on decision. Ask any couple why they had children and the honest answer, stripped of the standard pieties, will involve some combination of romance, social expectation, and the unexamined assumption that this is what life is for. The romance industry, the entire cultural apparatus of films, songs, weddings, and the mythology of finding the one, terminates almost without exception at the maternity ward. Romantic love, as the surrounding culture has defined it, is the antechamber to reproduction; the courtship is the drumroll, and the demographic outcome is the fall of the drumstick. None of this is examined because the examination would require asking what love actually is, a question this culture has been arranged to avoid. If parents had been required to see the full ecological bill of bringing a child into the present arrangement, including the food, water, energy, raw materials, land, and atmospheric burden the child would draw across a lifetime, demographic patterns would have looked different. The bill was not presented. The planet absorbed the cost. The maternity ward kept its lights on.

There is also, in current discourse, a fantasy worth dispatching briefly. The idea that the species can extract itself from the consequences of its arrangement on this planet by relocating to another one, Mars usually, or some moon further out, is presented as ambition and is in fact panic. You did not arrive here from elsewhere. You arose from this soil; your body is the local water and the local minerals reorganised into a temporary configuration, and the same configuration is what sustains your seeing, including the seeing that imagines an exit. There is no exit, because there is no separable you to exit. The fantasy is what the colonial Briton would have called a final solution dressed in the vocabulary of innovation: when the territory you have occupied is sufficiently exhausted, find a new one. The territory in this case is a planet, and the new territory does not exist, and the imagination that finds the proposal serious is the same imagination that found burning the Amazon a reasonable price for cheap beef.

Reduce the population to one person and the logic is identical. The person driving a heavy vehicle up a mountain road he does not love, to a ridge he will photograph and leave dirtier, is not a villain in the ordinary sense but something more uncomfortable: a person who has never been required to see the full account. He knows what he paid at the toll booth; he does not know what the mountain paid for his arrival. He knows what the Maggi cost; he does not know what the mountain will spend, over the next century, absorbing the packet. The gap between those two sets of figures is not an informational gap; it is a gap in the ego’s willingness to count things that it has categorised as outside itself, as belonging to another ledger entirely.

This is not a historical personality flaw; it is the operating logic of the ego as such, the insistence on a boundary between self and other that makes exploitation feel consequence-free, because the consequence falls on something the ego has already categorised as not itself. His pleasure and the mountain’s degradation occupy different columns in an accounting that he did not design and has never been asked to revise. Underneath the colonial accounting, underneath the corporate accounting, underneath the demographic accounting, runs the same philosophical error, older than industry and older than commerce: the conviction that the perceiver is fundamentally separate from the perceived, that the self is one thing and the world another, and that the suffering of the second is therefore not a charge against the welfare of the first. Every dualistic philosophy that has been authoritatively taught, in nearly every culture, has reinforced this conviction. It is not a small philosophical preference. It is the metaphysical permission slip on which every act of organised exploitation, from the jute factory to the petrol pump, has been signed.

Stealing From the People Who Will Inherit This

There is one further dimension of the theft that has so far been left out of the accounting, and it is the most uncomfortable one to name.

We have been speaking as though the cost of mispriced consumption is being borne by the planet, by other species, by the ecological systems we have decided we can draw on. All of this is true. But the planet is also a temporal entity, not only a spatial one, and the costs we are not paying in our lifetimes are landing in a column we do not look at: the column belonging to the children who will be alive when this arrangement reaches its terminus. Carbon thresholds that climate models projected for 2030 are now being reached in 2028. The systems are unwinding faster than the conservative projections allowed. The children currently in school in Delhi or Lucknow or Kanpur are not going to inherit a recovering system; they are going to inherit, on present trajectories, a system whose recovery their generation will have to negotiate, with resources we will have spent in their absence and on their behalf without consulting them.

We are not only living off the inheritance our ancestors left us in the form of forests and aquifers and atmospheric stability. We are living off the future our descendants would otherwise have inherited. We have eaten the past, and we are now eating the future. The household analogy, again, is exact: a man who has sold the silver his grandparents accumulated and is now selling, in advance, the labour his grandchildren have not yet performed, while complaining at the family table that times are difficult, is not a person his lineage will remember kindly. The curses that will land on this generation, when its children are old enough to understand what has been done in their names, will be deserved and will be specific, and the answer that this generation tried, that it brought green technology and signed accords and held conferences, will not be accepted, because the children will see, with the clarity all inheritors see, that the trying was a way of avoiding the stopping.

What Actually Has to Change

The mountains are on fire and India’s cities are furnaces. The bill for two centuries of mispriced consumption is arriving in a form no government can tax and no court can adjudicate, on a schedule that runs ahead of every published forecast. The question that remains is a simple one, though not an easy one: whether the person who drove up to the hills, ate the Maggi, and tossed the packet into the ravine is willing, at any point, to reckon with the distance between what he paid and what it cost. Not as a matter of guilt, which is merely the ego examining itself and finding itself wanting, which changes nothing; but as a matter of honest seeing.

The traditions that have addressed this most clearly have not done so as poetry. When Buddha is said to have offered his own thigh in place of a lamb being taken to slaughter, the story is not a moral fable; it is a precise demonstration of what the dissolution of the boundary actually involves. If you and the lamb are not separate, then the loss of the lamb is your loss, and the negotiation is no longer between a butcher and his trade but between the butcher and a body that recognises itself in what is being cut. Saint Kabir and Bulleh Shah and the long line of poets who taught what they taught were not running a sentimental enterprise. They were pointing at the same recognition, in a different register: that the kind of love capable of restraining the human appetite is not the love that says I love the hills, they are good for boys and girls, that arranges weddings against scenic backdrops while the scenic backdrop dies, that takes the hills as the object of a brief romantic experience to be filmed and uploaded. That love is appetite wearing a costume. The love the saints pointed at is what remains when the costume comes off, and what remains, when it remains, has the property that it cannot exploit what it has recognised, in the way that you cannot bring yourself to loot what you have come to know is your own body.

The person who has seen, even once, that the forest and the river and the mountain are not outside himself but are the condition of his own existence, finds that the urge to consume them cheaply has nowhere to lodge, not because he has become virtuous, but because the structure that made the exploitation feel consequence-free has been briefly interrupted, and in that interruption, the actual cost of the fifty-rupee packet becomes visible. The carbon credit no longer satisfies him. The electric vehicle no longer satisfies him. The Mars exit no longer satisfies him. None of these were ever going to satisfy him, but until the boundary moved, he could not see why.

Everything else will remain a more sophisticated version of the same ledger, with the planet’s losses buried in a column that the market has agreed not to open, the producing geographies kept poor enough to keep the consuming geographies stocked, the atmosphere absorbing the difference, and a generation of children growing up to inherit the reckoning their parents preferred not to have. The bill is arriving. It has the date and the address correct. The only remaining question is whether it is opened.