I was eleven when I learned that grief does not belong to humans alone.

There was a street dog near our house. Her name was Sherry.

She had the gentlest eyes I had ever seen in a dog, and when she gave birth to two little female puppies, our small world suddenly had two more lives in it.

We named them Fasty and Chocolaty.

Fasty was all movement. True to her name, she was quick — especially when food was involved. The moment we put food down, she would rush toward it, eating as though someone might take it away.

Chocolaty was different.

She was quieter.

She would wait until Fasty had finished before slowly coming closer.

At first, we thought that was simply her nature.

Then we noticed she wasn’t keeping up anymore.

While Fasty ran around the house, Chocolaty began spending more time curled up beside the shelter.

Then she stopped running.

Then she stopped playing.

One afternoon, we noticed that she hadn’t touched her food.

We tried again later.

She barely looked at it.

The next day, she seemed even weaker.

We began giving her softer food, trying different things, hoping something would bring back the little puppy we knew.

Nothing did.

And Sherry noticed.

She started watching her daughter.

She would sit beside Chocolaty for long stretches, almost as if she were waiting for her to get up.

Sometimes she would nudge her gently.

Chocolaty would move a little.

And Sherry would settle down beside her again.

Days passed.

Chocolaty grew quieter.

Her little body seemed to have less and less strength in it.

We took her to doctors. We tried to feed her. We kept hoping that perhaps tomorrow would be different.

But every morning, she looked a little farther away.

Sherry wouldn’t leave her side.

She stayed close, watching.

If Chocolaty slept, Sherry watched.

If she moved, Sherry followed.

There was something different in the way she looked at her daughter.

It wasn’t ordinary watchfulness anymore.

It was as though she was waiting for something none of us wanted to name.

Then, after a few more days, Chocolaty stopped moving.

The little puppy who had once slept beside her sister was gone.

We buried her in a barren piece of land near our house.

At eleven, I thought burial meant goodbye.

I was wrong.

Sherry did not understand goodbye.

She went to where we had buried Chocolaty and brought her back.

We took Chocolaty away again.

Sherry brought her back again.

We did it a third time.

And Sherry still carried her daughter home.

She would pick her up and drag her back to the little shelter where the two puppies had once slept beside each other.

Perhaps she thought Chocolaty was only sleeping.

Perhaps she thought that if she brought her home enough times, she would wake up.

We were afraid for Fasty. She was still young, and we worried that staying near Chocolaty could make her sick. So eventually, we took Sherry farther away and gave Chocolaty’s body to people who lived elsewhere.

When Sherry returned, she began searching.

She searched the places where Chocolaty used to be.

She sniffed the ground.

She wandered around the shelter.

She kept looking for a scent that had once been everywhere and was suddenly nowhere.

But there was nothing.

Chocolaty was gone.

And Sherry knew.

She stopped eating.

Food was placed before her, but she would turn away.

She cried through the day.

She cried through the night.

I had never heard a sound like that from an animal before.

It wasn’t barking.

It wasn’t whining.

It sounded like something inside her was calling for someone who would never answer.

She had lost her daughter.

And there was nothing anyone could explain to her.

A few days later, Sherry passed away too.

I was only eleven, and I didn’t have the words for what I had witnessed.

Years later, I do.

It was grief.

It was love.

It was a mother refusing to leave her child behind.

Sometimes, when I remember Sherry, my eyes still fill with tears.

Because she taught me something I have carried ever since:

Animals may not know how to speak about love, but that does not mean they feel it any less.

Maybe they feel it more quietly.

Maybe more honestly.

And maybe the most heartbreaking thing about love is that sometimes, even when the heart knows someone is gone, it keeps looking for them anyway.

Sherry kept bringing her daughter home.

Perhaps that was all she knew to do.

Perhaps that was her way of saying — 

You were mine.
You are still mine.
And I am not ready to leave you behind.

As society sees it, a daughter was born in a village — a child born into a culture where daughters are celebrated in words, yet not always given the respect they truly deserve.

People say the arrival of a daughter brings immense joy. And perhaps it does. But beneath those celebrations, society’s narrow expectations can still linger. From the moment she entered the world, people noticed that she had certain physical limitations and were told that these challenges might remain with her as she grew.

Some people stepped forward to support her.

Others quietly walked away.

But somewhere in that beginning, something unbreakable took root inside her.

She discovered a strength she didn’t know she possessed — a quiet force that refused to let life defeat her. Perhaps she was destined to stand against whatever came her way.

And that is exactly what she did.

As she grew older, a mountain of hardships seemed to collapse upon her. She endured painful struggles, bullying, rejection, and words that could have easily broken a child.

Yet she remained standing.

At an age when most children were still learning how the world worked, she was already learning how cruel it could be. She carried burdens and understood truths about life that some people never understand even after becoming adults.

Still, she held on to one belief:

She would never give up.

And strangely, despite everything that happened to her, she never allowed herself to become someone who hated the world.

Her faith in God, in the Universe, and in something greater than herself remained quietly alive.

Then came school.

School was not a place of comfort for her. It felt like being a defenseless creature lost in a forest where everything around her seemed determined to attack.

She survived those years too.

And then, somewhere along that difficult journey, her path crossed with a young man.

Something about their connection felt different.

Perhaps it was coincidence.

Perhaps it was simply two wounded people recognizing something familiar in one another.

Or perhaps it was what people call a soul connection — the strange feeling that two people who have endured enormous suffering can recognize each other’s pain without needing to explain every wound.

He had suffered too.

Perhaps even more than she knew.

He was strong. Resilient. Brave.

And, most importantly, he cared about her.

For a girl who had spent much of her life feeling deprived of affection and safety, that care meant more than she could explain.

Slowly, dangerously, beautifully, she began to attach her heart to him.

She wanted to stay beside him.

She wanted to see him happy.

She wanted to protect him from every pain she could possibly protect him from.

And somewhere along the way, her longing for him became so deep that she began putting his happiness before her own.

The girl who had once stood fearlessly against the world found herself softening in ways she had never imagined. She was willing to adjust, to compromise, to let go of her pride — not because she was weak, but because, for the first time, there was someone whose happiness mattered to her more than winning an argument or proving herself right.

She didn’t mind bending a little for love.

She didn’t mind taking a few steps back if it meant protecting something precious to her.

But somewhere between loving him and trying to hold on to him, she forgot that love also needed balance. She began giving more of herself than she was ready to lose.

And perhaps that was her mistake — not that she loved too much, but that she hadn’t yet learned how to love someone deeply without losing the person she had fought so hard to become.

The young man, however, saw her differently.

To him, she was a friend.

A deeply valued friend.

He cared about her, but his feelings did not cross the boundary she had crossed in her heart.

And he was honest about it.

He told her that they needed to separate.

For her, those words did not feel like an ordinary goodbye.

They felt like the collapse of the one place where she had finally allowed herself to feel safe.

She broke down beneath the weight of it.

She cried.

She screamed.

She locked herself away from the world and entered the darkest emotional chapter she had ever known.

The difference was that every battle she had fought before had been against something outside herself — bullies, judgement, cruelty, circumstances.

This time, the battle was inside her.

And heartbreak follows no familiar rules.

She had developed an attachment so deep that losing him felt like losing a part of her own identity.

The young man cared deeply for her too. He never wanted anything terrible to happen to her. Yet circumstances, responsibilities, and realities beyond their control created a distance between them.

On the day everything fell apart, the girl who had never willingly bowed before anyone swallowed every piece of pride she had.

Not because she was weak.

Because she was terrified of losing someone she loved.

She pleaded for the bond to survive.

But sometimes two people can care about each other deeply and still be unable to walk the same road.

His circumstances were heavy.

His responsibilities were real.

And despite whatever he may have felt inside, he could not give her the future she was hoping for.

So he left.

And she was left to face the one thing she had spent her entire life believing she could never survive:

losing someone she loved.

For a while, the grief consumed everything.

But slowly, something inside her began to change.

She started getting back up.

One day at a time.

One breath at a time.

One ordinary morning after another.

And eventually, she realised something extraordinary.

She had survived the thing she feared most.

And if she could survive that, perhaps there was very little left in this world that could truly frighten her.

The girl who once worried endlessly about people’s opinions began letting those opinions disappear into the background.

The girl who once needed someone else’s presence to feel secure began discovering her own presence.

The girl who had once been willing to surrender herself for love slowly found herself again.

She became fearless — not because life had become easier, but because she had finally understood how much she could endure.

Yet there was one thing she could not completely erase.

She still loved him.

Not loudly.

Not desperately.

Not in the way she once had.

But somewhere deep inside her, there remained a quiet corner that still belonged to him.

And then something even more surprising happened.

Her love changed.

At first, she had been greedy to have him.

She wanted his time.

His presence.

His attention.

She wanted to be the person beside him.

But after everything she had survived, that greed slowly transformed into something else.

She became greedy for his happiness.

She wants him to have every happiness this world can possibly give him.

She wants him to receive everything he deserves — the peace he has spent years searching for, the love he has always needed, and the kind of life that makes all his past suffering feel worth surviving.

She prays for him.

Perhaps more often than he will ever know.

Every day, somewhere in the quietest corner of her heart, she asks the Universe for only one thing for him:

That he finds the love of his life.

Someone who chooses him completely.

Someone who understands him.

Someone who stays.

Someone who gives him the tenderness he deserves.

She doesn’t pray to be that person anymore.

She prays that someone becomes that person for him.

And yet, there is one promise she quietly keeps — not because he asked for it, and not because she expects anything in return.

If someday life becomes too heavy for him, if there comes a moment when he feels lost or exhausted, if he ever needs somewhere to put down the weight he has been carrying, she wants him to know that he can still call.

Not because she is waiting for him to come back.

Not because she is secretly hoping that one day he will change his mind.

Not because she wants anything from him.

But simply because she knows what it feels like to have too much inside you and nowhere to put it.

If he ever needs to speak, she will listen.

If he ever needs to admit that he is struggling, she will let him be vulnerable.

If he ever needs to tell someone what he has been carrying, she will be there — not to fix him, not to claim him, and not to ask for anything in return.

Just to listen.

Just to remind him that he doesn’t always have to be strong.

Perhaps that is the strangest thing about the love she carries now.

There are no demands left in it.

No conditions.

No bargaining.

No expectation that he owes her a place in his future.

She simply wants him to be okay.

And maybe that is what she means when she says she has become greedy for his happiness.

She wants the whole world to be kind to him.

She wants him to laugh without remembering why he once cried.

She wants him to wake up one day and realise that life has finally given him something beautiful.

She wants him to find someone who loves him enough to stay through his difficult days and celebrate his good ones.

She wants him to have a home in another person’s heart.

And if that home is not hers, she will still be grateful that he found one.

There is, however, a boundary she has finally learned to draw.

She can be there for him without waiting for him.

She can care about him without expecting him to love her.

She can listen to his pain without turning his vulnerability into a doorway back into her life.

If he ever calls because the world feels too heavy, she will answer — not because she is secretly hoping that the call will change their story, but because once someone has mattered that deeply to you, their well being can still matter even after the relationship has changed.

She will let him speak.

She will let him be vulnerable.

She will let him say the things he cannot say anywhere else, if he ever needs to.

But she will never ask, “Do you still love me?”

She will never use his difficult moments to pull him closer.

She will never make his pain an opportunity to ask for what he cannot give.

And she will never confuse being there for him with belonging to him.

She is not waiting at the door for him to come back.

The door is simply not locked.

If he needs a friend, she is there.

If he needs someone to listen, she is there.

If he needs to remind himself that someone in this world still cares, she is there.

But she continues walking forward with her own life.

Because loving someone does not mean putting your own life on pause until they return.

She can leave the light on for a friend without sitting beside the window waiting for him to come home.

She still wishes, sometimes, that circumstances had been different.

Of course she does.

She is human.

There are nights when a small part of her wonders what might have happened if life had been kinder, if timing had been different, if circumstances had allowed their paths to meet at the right moment.

But she no longer builds her life around those questions.

She accepts reality.

Their paths might not align.

Their story might never become the story she once imagined.

And perhaps that is okay.

Because not every profound connection is meant to become a lifelong partnership.

Some people enter our lives to change us.

Some teach us how deeply we can feel.

Some teach us how badly we can hurt.

And some teach us how to find ourselves again after we have lost our way.

He may have been her closest friend.

He may have been the person she once imagined as her soulmate.

Perhaps he was simply someone whose presence changed the direction of her life.

She doesn’t know.

And maybe she doesn’t need to know.

She no longer asks the Universe for a particular ending.

She doesn’t bargain with fate.

She simply hopes that whatever happens, both of them find peace.

And if she is allowed one small wish, it is not for him to return.

It is simply this:

Let them remain friends, if life ever makes room for it.

Perhaps years from now, far beyond the intensity of youth and heartbreak, they might unexpectedly find themselves sitting across from each other in some quiet corner of a café.

Not as lovers.

Not as people trying to reclaim what was lost.

Just two old friends.

They might laugh about the things that once felt like the end of the world.

They might tell each other about the people they became.

They might talk about the dreams they chased, the battles they survived, and all the strange turns life took after they went their separate ways.

And maybe she will look at him then and realise something.

She didn’t lose everything when he left.

She lost the version of herself who believed she needed him in order to be whole.

And in losing that version of herself, she found someone far more powerful.

She found the girl who had been there all along.

The daughter who survived a world that underestimated her.

The child who grew up carrying more than she should have.

The girl who endured cruelty without becoming cruel.

The woman who loved deeply without allowing love to destroy her.

And finally, the person who learned that sometimes the purest form of love is not saying,

“Choose me.”

Sometimes it is quietly saying,

“Wherever life takes you, I hope someone loves you well. I hope someone protects your heart. I hope you are happy — even if that happiness no longer has a place for me.”

And perhaps that is where her story truly begins.

Not with him.

Not with heartbreak.

But with herself.

Yet there is one final thing she cannot quite surrender to the Universe.

One tiny complaint.

Everything else, she has learned to accept.

But this one thing still escapes her:

If there is another life, another beginning, another chance given to two souls — then, Universe, make me a little luckier next time.

Let me find him again.

Let our timing be kinder.

Let circumstances be softer.

Let me meet him when neither of us has to choose between love and life.

Let me be lucky enough, just once, to end up beside him.

Because in this life, she has learned to let him go.

But that does not mean letting him go was easy.

It was one of the hardest things she has ever had to do.

She can accept it.

She can respect his choice.

She can wish him a beautiful future.

She can even genuinely hope that another woman becomes the love of his life.

But somewhere inside her, there will always remain one quiet truth:

She loved him.

And sometimes, acceptance doesn’t mean the pain disappears.

Sometimes it simply means you learn how to carry the pain without making it someone else’s burden.

So she carries it.

Quietly.

Gracefully.

Without asking him to return.

Without asking life to change its decision.

She only keeps one little wish hidden inside her heart —

that if there really is another life,

perhaps that time, she will be lucky enough to find her way to him.

The wind at Blackwood Cliff was cold enough to hurt.

She stood there alone, her scarf pulled tightly around her neck, staring into the darkness below.

The girl had every reason to close her eyes.

The world had been cruel to her in more ways than she could explain, and she was tired of pretending it hadn’t left its marks.

Still, somewhere inside all that exhaustion, she knew what she had decided.

He was gone.

Not because he had stopped caring.

Not because what they shared had suddenly become meaningless.

Sometimes circumstances are crueler than people. Sometimes misunderstandings, forced choices, distance, and silence can separate two people who still matter deeply to each other.

She had tried to carry all of it.

Until one night, she couldn’t anymore.

The wind moved through her hair.

She didn’t move.

Then she heard it.

“Help!”

Her head lifted.

“Someone please — help me!”

The voice was coming from somewhere below.

She looked through the trees.

Four figures.

A girl struggling against them.

A van waiting nearby.

For a few seconds, she simply stood there.

Then something inside her spoke louder than her pain.

No.

I can’t let this happen.

She didn’t know where the strength came from.

She only knew she had to move.

She pulled her scarf over her face.

Lowered her hood.

And ran.

She didn’t suddenly become fearless.

She was still exhausted.

Still hurting.

Still carrying everything that had brought her to that cliff.

But someone else was in danger.

And somehow, that was enough to make her forget her own pain for a moment.

She reached the girl.

The next few moments happened too quickly to understand properly.

There was shouting.

Struggling.

Fear.

She fought back however she could.

One of the men struck her, and she fell.

For a moment, she couldn’t hear anything except the ringing in her ears.

Then she heard the girl again.

And she got back up.

Not because she was stronger than them.

Because she couldn’t leave her there.

The men eventually backed away.

Maybe they hadn’t expected anyone to interfere.

Maybe they hadn’t expected a girl who looked just as frightened as the person she was trying to protect.

Whatever the reason, they left.

The van disappeared into the darkness.

And suddenly, there was silence

The rescued girl sat on the ground, breathing hard.

She looked up at the stranger standing in front of her.

“Who are you?”

No answer.

The girl swallowed.

“Please… what’s your name?”

She looked back toward the cliff.

And something inside her shifted.

If I had stayed there…

She stopped herself.

She didn’t want to finish the thought.

Because now she understood something she hadn’t understood before.

Her life wasn’t only about what was hurting her.

There were people who loved her.

People who would feel her absence.

People whose lives would be changed by a decision they had never been given a chance to stop.

And there was him.

She knew him.

She knew the strength he showed everyone.

She also knew the person underneath it.

Their bond didn’t need a perfect explanation.

Some people simply become part of you.

And suddenly, she didn’t want to disappear.

Not tonight.

Maybe she didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.

Maybe the pain wasn’t magically gone.

Maybe nothing had been solved.

But she could take one more step.

Then another.

She could stay for tonight.

Tomorrow could be dealt with tomorrow.

The girl was still looking at her.

“Who are you?”

This time, she turned.

A tiny smile appeared beneath the scarf.

“Call me Elsa.”

And then she walked away.

The girl watched her disappear between the trees.

She didn’t know who had saved her.

She didn’t know where the stranger was going.

She only knew that someone who had been carrying her own darkness had stopped to pull another person out of theirs.

And maybe that was the strangest part of that night.

She had gone to the cliff believing she had nothing left to give.

She came back knowing she still had something left to live for.

Not a perfect life.

Not an easy life.

Just another morning.

And sometimes, another morning is enough.

Instead, I found myself thinking about something much bigger:

What actually makes a person exceptional?

Not just wealthy.

Not just successful.

But mentally strong, curious, capable, courageous, and excellent at whatever they choose to pursue.

The more I read, the more I realised that Musk’s story isn’t simply about building companies. It’s about a particular way of approaching life.

These are the ten lessons that stayed with me.

1. Never Be Too Successful to Be a Beginner

One of the things that fascinated me most about Musk wasn’t how much he knew.

It was how willing he was to learn what he didn’t know.

When he entered an unfamiliar field, he asked questions. He spoke to experts. He learned the fundamentals. He became a student again.

And I think that’s much harder than it sounds.

The more we know, the more difficult it becomes to admit that we don’t know something.

Imagine you want to become a writer and you find someone with 50,000 followers.

You can either compare yourself with them or become their student.

You can ask:

How did you do this?

What am I missing?

What should I learn?

There is no shame in being a beginner.

The real problem is pretending you aren’t one.

2. Don’t Just Do Something. Understand It.

Musk’s obsession with details is almost uncomfortable at times.

Even when there are engineers, designers, and entire teams responsible for different parts of a project, he wants to understand what is actually happening.

What does this component do?

Why does it cost this much?

Why was it designed this way?

Can it be simpler?

Can it be cheaper?

Can it be better?

And I think there’s a lesson here for all of us.

We often want the result without understanding the process that produced it.

If I see a writer with 50,000 followers, I could simply think, “She’s lucky.”

Or I could become curious.

Why do people read her?

What does she do differently?

How does she structure her posts?

What makes people stop scrolling?

How did she build that audience?

Don’t envy the result. Study the mechanism behind it.

3. Have a Vision That Scares You

Most of us have desires.

Very few of us have visions.

There is a difference.

If I earn ₹5,000 today and say, “I want to become a billionaire,” that’s a desire.

A vision asks a much harder question:

“What would I have to become for that to be possible?”

That’s where ambition becomes serious.

A vision should stretch you beyond the person you currently are.

It should make you think:

Can I actually do this?

And maybe that’s a good thing.

Because if your dream fits perfectly inside your current abilities, perhaps it isn’t forcing you to grow.

Think bigger than what your surroundings have taught you to consider possible.

Not because every enormous dream will come true.

But because you cannot build an extraordinary life while constantly limiting yourself to what feels reasonable.

4. Learn to Live With Uncertainty

We want guarantees.

Before starting something, we want to know that it will work.

Before publishing something, we want to know people will like it.

Before taking a risk, we want to know we won’t fail.

But the problem is that meaningful things rarely come with guarantees.

SpaceX’s early story is full of uncertainty and failure. At several points, the company was dangerously close to running out of options.

Yet uncertainty didn’t automatically become a reason to stop.

And that’s something I think we need to learn.

You don’t always need certainty to move forward.

Sometimes you simply need enough conviction to say:

“I don’t know what will happen. But I’m willing to find out.”

Maybe that’s what courage actually looks like.

Not knowing the ending — and continuing anyway.

5. Believe in Something Before Everyone Else Does

There is something powerful about having a sense of destiny.

Not the kind where you sit back and assume the universe will do everything for you.

I’m talking about the feeling that says:

“This is what I want to spend my life building, and I will figure out how to get there.”

Everyone can believe in a dream once it becomes successful.

The difficult part is believing in something while it is still invisible to everyone else.

Before the audience.

Before the money.

Before the recognition.

Before the proof.

And perhaps that’s where conviction matters most.

You don’t need to know that you’ll succeed.

You need to believe that what you’re doing is worth working toward.

A dream gives you a destination. Conviction makes you keep walking when nobody else can see it.

6. Surround Yourself With People Who Can Outshine You

We like being around people who make us feel intelligent.

People who agree with us.

People who understand us.

People who make us comfortable.

But growth doesn’t always feel comfortable.

Sometimes you need people who know more than you.

People from different fields.

Different generations.

Different backgrounds.

Different ways of thinking.

Yes, they may outshine you.

They may make you realise how much you don’t know.

They may even challenge beliefs you’ve held for years.

Good.

Maybe you don’t need to be the brightest person in the room. Maybe you need to be in a room that makes you brighter.

7. Don’t Kill Your Ego. Learn to Use It.

We usually talk about ego as though it’s automatically a bad thing.

And arrogance can certainly destroy people.

But I don’t think every form of ego is harmful.

Sometimes ego is simply the voice that says:

“I refuse to believe this is the best I can become.”

There is a difference between:

“I’m better than everyone.”

and

“I want to become better than who I was yesterday.”

The second kind of ego can be fuel.

And here’s where success becomes interesting.

Getting your first 1,000 readers is one challenge.

Getting 50,000 is another.

But what happens after that?

Can you still work as hard?

Can you still remain curious?

Can you still improve when you’ve already received recognition?

Perhaps the hardest part of success isn’t reaching the top.

It’s keeping the hunger that got you there.

8. Passion Is Not Enough. Master It.

We’re constantly told to follow our passion.

But passion by itself doesn’t make us excellent.

You can love writing and still write badly.

You can love business and still be terrible at it.

You can love something deeply and never become good at it.

Because passion gives you energy.

Mastery gives that energy direction.

Eventually, the romantic part disappears.

There are boring days.

Repetitive days.

Days when nobody notices your work.

Days when you don’t feel inspired at all.

That’s when you find out whether you truly care about something.

Passion says:

“I love this.”

Mastery asks:

“Are you willing to work at this long enough to become excellent?”

9. Be Willing to Take the Risk

Every meaningful decision carries some risk.

Starting something new.

Changing careers.

Publishing your work.

Building a company.

Trying something you’ve never tried before.

There is always a possibility that it won’t work.

But there’s another risk we rarely talk about:

the risk of never finding out what you could have become.

I’m not saying we should become reckless.

Taking a risk and ignoring consequences are two completely different things.

But sometimes we become so afraid of failure that we make safety our entire strategy.

And a completely safe life can become a very small life.

You don’t need to know that you’ll succeed.

You just need enough courage to say:

“I’m willing to try.”

10. Go Back to First Principles

Perhaps the most interesting idea I took away from Musk’s approach is first-principles thinking.

Instead of starting with:

“How is this normally done?”

Start with:

“What is actually true?”

Break the problem down.

What do I know?

What am I assuming?

What is genuinely necessary?

What have I accepted simply because everyone else accepts it?

What happens if I start from the very beginning?

I think this applies far beyond rockets and technology.

If everyone tells me that successful writers have to write in a particular way, I can ask why.

If everyone tells me I need a particular career to be successful, I can ask why.

If everyone tells me something is impossible, I can ask:

“Impossible because of what?”

Sometimes we don’t need a better answer.

We need a better question.

And perhaps that’s what first-principles thinking really gives us:

the courage to return to zero and think for ourselves.

What I Actually Took Away From the Book

I started reading Elon Musk because I wanted to understand the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and everything else he has built.

But by the end, I wasn’t thinking much about becoming wealthy.

I was thinking about becoming capable.

About remaining a student even when I know something.

About understanding things instead of simply accepting them.

About having ambitions that genuinely stretch me.

About becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

About finding people who challenge me.

About using ego as fuel without becoming arrogant.

About turning passion into mastery.

About taking risks without becoming reckless.

And about questioning the things everyone else has stopped questioning.

Maybe that’s the real difference between wanting an extraordinary life and actually building one.

You don’t just have to dream bigger.

You have to become bigger than the person who first had the dream.

And perhaps that’s the most valuable thing a biography can give us — not a formula for becoming Elon Musk, but a reason to ask:

“What am I capable of becoming if I stop thinking like the person I am today?”

We don’t simply judge their profession.

We use their profession to judge their entire character.

A woman is a prostitute, and suddenly people believe they know what kind of person she is.

Her morality.

Her values.

Her intentions.

Her dignity.

Sometimes, they even begin judging the character of women who simply speak to her.

And I have always wondered:

Why?

Why does an occupation become a certificate of a person’s entire character?

I Saw This During COVID

During COVID, two women came to live around my neighbourhood.

At first, nobody knew what they did for a living.

And honestly, I sometimes wonder whether they would even have been given a place to live if people had known from the beginning.

Eventually, people began coming to them.

And then something else happened.

If another girl spoke to them, people started questioning her character too.

If someone was seen around them, assumptions were made.

Stories were created.

Reputations were discussed.

But I kept asking myself one question:

Why were these women being blamed for the behaviour of the men who came to them?

Why weren’t those men questioned?

Why wasn’t anyone asking:

“Why do you look at women like this?”

“Why do you reduce a woman to her body?”

“Why do you think your desire gives you the right to define her worth?”

Because if a man looks at every woman as a sexual object, isn’t that a failure of his gaze?

Why should that become evidence against the woman?

A Profession Is Not a Complete Biography

Let me be clear.

Respecting a person does not mean that you have to agree with everything they do.

Someone can have moral, religious, cultural, or personal objections to prostitution.

That’s their right.

But disagreement with a profession does not give anyone the right to dehumanise the person performing it.

A profession is something a person does. It is not the entirety of who that person is.

We understand this principle in almost every other part of life.

We don’t look at someone’s occupation and assume we know every thought they have ever had, every value they possess, every struggle they have faced, or every dream they have carried.

So why do we suddenly forget this when the profession involves sexuality?

A woman can be a daughter.

A sister.

A mother.

A friend.

A neighbour.

A person with dreams.

A person with fears.

A person with ambitions.

A person who has made choices.

And sometimes, a person whose choices were taken away from her.

That distinction matters.

Because not every woman enters prostitution for the same reason.

Some may enter by choice.

Some may enter because of poverty.

Some may be coerced.

Some may be trafficked.

Some may be manipulated.

Some may simply have had fewer choices than the rest of us.

So when someone has been forced into sexual exploitation, the question should not be:

“What is wrong with her?”

It should be:

“Who failed her?”

What About the Men?

This is the conversation I wish we had more often.

If society considers prostitution immoral, why does the moral conversation almost always begin and end with the woman?

Why is her character discussed endlessly while the men who seek her services remain almost invisible?

Why do we examine her clothes, her friendships, her neighbours and her reputation while rarely asking anything about the men involved?

If prostitution exists, there is demand.

There are customers.

There are economic circumstances.

There are intermediaries.

There are sometimes systems of exploitation and trafficking.

So why does shame travel almost exclusively in one direction?

Why does the woman carry the burden of a system that involves many other people?

And perhaps most importantly:

Why do we allow a man’s perception of a woman to become a woman’s responsibility?

If a man chooses to see a woman only as a body, that tells us something about his gaze.

It does not automatically tell us something about her worth.

What Can Our Religious Traditions Teach Us About Human Dignity?

I want to be careful here.

I don’t want to put words into the mouths of religions simply to strengthen my argument.

None of the traditions below needs to be used to claim that prostitution itself is morally approved.

The texts are more complicated than that.

What they can offer us are principles about human dignity, compassion, equality, spiritual worth, and protection from exploitation.

Hinduism: Seeing Beyond Social Labels

The Bhagavad Gita says:

विद्याविनयसंपन्ने ब्राह्मणे गवि हस्तिनि।
शुनि चैव श्वपाके च पण्डिताः समदर्शिनः॥

Vidya-vinaya-sampanne brahmane gavi hastini
shuni chaiva shvapake cha panditah samadarshinah.

Meaning: The truly learned see with equal vision a learned and humble Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and one regarded as an outcast.

This verse does not specifically mention prostitutes.

And I don’t want to pretend that it does.

But its principle is powerful: wisdom is associated with the ability to see beyond the social categories through which we rank living beings.

If our spiritual understanding teaches us to look beyond social status, then surely a person’s occupation cannot be enough to erase their humanity.

Christianity: The People Society Looks Down Upon

There is a striking passage in the Gospel of Matthew.

Jesus says:

“The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

— Matthew 21:31

The point is not that prostitution itself is being celebrated.

Jesus is confronting people who considered themselves morally superior.

And that is precisely what makes the passage relevant here.

The people society has already labelled as morally inferior may possess more humility and openness than the people who believe themselves righteous.

The lesson is not:

“Everything is acceptable.”

The lesson is:

Don’t turn moral judgement into moral superiority.

Islam: Do Not Blame the Coerced

The Qur’an says in 24:33 that women should not be compelled into prostitution.

It specifically addresses the coercion of women and speaks of God’s forgiveness and mercy toward those who have been compelled.

Again, this is not a statement that prostitution itself is approved.

But it establishes an important distinction:

A person who is forced into exploitation should not be treated as though she freely authored the exploitation done to her.

That distinction is desperately important in a world where victims are often made to carry the shame of what happened to them.

Sikhism: Spiritual Worth Is Not Cancelled by Social Identity

The Guru Granth Sahib refers to Ganika, a prostitute, in the context of spiritual liberation.

One passage says:

ਗਨਿਕਾ ਉਧਰੀ ਹਰਿ ਕਹੈ ਤੋਤ ॥

Ganikā udharī har kahai tot.

The passage presents Ganika as spiritually saved through remembrance of the Divine.

Again, this should not be twisted into a claim that Sikh scripture declares prostitution virtuous.

It doesn’t.

But it does offer something deeply meaningful:

A person’s association with a socially condemned identity does not place them beyond spiritual worth.

And perhaps that is something society needs to remember.

I Don’t Have to Approve of Your Profession to Respect You

This is where I stand.

I don’t need to know your entire story before deciding that you deserve basic dignity.

I don’t need to know whether you chose prostitution.

I don’t need to know whether circumstances pushed you into it.

I don’t need to agree with your profession.

I only need to recognise that you are a human being.

That is the principle my parents gave me through my upbringing.

They taught me, perhaps without ever saying it directly, to see the person first.

Not the occupation.

Not the income.

Not the reputation.

Not the rumours.

The person.

I remember those two women from COVID.

I remember that I never looked at them differently because of what they did.

If they needed something and I could help, I helped.

Not because I was trying to prove that I was a good person.

Not because I knew that one day I would write about them.

I simply didn’t see a reason to treat them as less human.

And for that, I will always be grateful to my parents.

To Every Woman in Prostitution

I don’t know your entire story.

I don’t know what brought you here.

Maybe it was your choice.

Maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe it began with poverty.

Maybe coercion.

Maybe exploitation.

Maybe circumstances you never imagined for yourself.

Maybe you simply made a decision that someone else would never have made.

But I don’t believe your profession gives the world permission to erase your humanity.

I don’t believe anyone deserves to be reduced to a label.

And I certainly don’t believe another person’s desire gives them the right to decide your worth.

So this is not an article asking society to romanticise prostitution.

It is asking for something much simpler:

Stop confusing dignity with approval.

You can disagree with a profession and still respect the person.

You can oppose exploitation without humiliating the exploited.

You can believe something is morally wrong without deciding that every person associated with it is morally worthless.

And if a woman has been forced into this life, perhaps the first question should not be:

“What kind of woman is she?”

Perhaps it should be:

“Who failed her?”

And when a man sees a woman only as a body, perhaps we should stop asking what is wrong with her and start asking what has gone wrong with his gaze.

Because no profession can make a human being less human.

No label can erase a person’s dignity.

And no society that claims to value humanity should make someone beg for the right to be treated like one.

Humanity comes before occupation.

That is where my respect begins.

Not with a profession.

Not with an agreement.

Not with approval.

Simply with the fact that she is a human being.

And that should have been enough from the beginning.

Some crimes don’t just hurt a person.
They destroy the meaning of trust.

What did I just read?

I have been asking myself this question for hours.

I read a case today.
A father.
His daughter.
A child.
And rape.

I closed the article.
Then I opened it again.

Not because I wanted to know more.
Because somehow, my mind refused to believe what it had just read.

How could a father rape his own daughter?

I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question.
I genuinely mean it.

How?

How does a person look at their own child — the child who trusts them, loves them, runs to them — and choose to become the very thing that child needs protection from?

I keep thinking about the girl.

And I don’t want to think about the courtroom first.
I don’t want to think about the evidence.
I don’t want to think about the sentence.

I want to think about her.

Imagine being a child in your own home.
Your own room.
Your own familiar walls.
And your father walks in.

You don’t become afraid immediately.
Why would you?
He’s your father.

Maybe he’s angry.
Maybe you did something wrong.
Maybe you should say sorry.
Maybe he’ll calm down.

That is what trust does to a child.
It doesn’t make her suspicious.
It makes her believe.

And then something happens that she cannot understand.
Something that makes her afraid.
Something that makes her wonder:

“What is happening?”
“What did I do?”
“Why is Papa behaving like this?”

And then comes the question that breaks me the most:

“Who do I ask for help?”

Because she was supposed to ask him.
She was supposed to run to him.
He was supposed to be the person she ran towards when something scared her.

And suddenly —
he was the thing she was scared of.

Tell me how a child is supposed to understand that.

How do you explain betrayal to someone who hasn’t even learned to question the person they love?
How does a daughter separate the father she knew from the person who hurt her?
How does she go back to calling him Dad?
How does she sit in the same house?
How does she hear someone say, “He’s your father. Talk to him.”?

Talk to him?
About what?

How do you tell your father that your father has hurt you?
How do you say the words when the person who was supposed to protect you is the person you are afraid of?

And that is where I stopped thinking about the crime alone.

Because yes, a rape happened.
But something else happened too.

A relationship was destroyed.
A child’s understanding of safety was destroyed.
Her idea of home was changed.
Her understanding of trust was changed.

And perhaps that is what makes this so unbearable for me.

We can talk about the crime.
We can talk about evidence.
We can talk about DNA.
We can talk about conviction.
We can talk about life imprisonment.

Justice matters.
It absolutely does.

But there is another question that none of these words can answer:

What happens to a child’s trust after the person she trusted most becomes the person who betrays her?

I don’t know.
And I don’t think anyone can answer that easily.

I have read about terrible things before.
I have encountered violence in literature.
I have read about it in history.
I have seen cases in the news.

But today, I couldn’t simply move on.

Because I kept imagining the confusion.
The fear.
The silence.
The thought of a child wondering whether she had done something wrong.

And that thought made me angry.
So angry.

Because she hadn’t done anything wrong.
She didn’t deserve to carry the shame.
She didn’t deserve the silence.
She didn’t deserve to question herself.
She didn’t deserve to protect the reputation of the person who failed to protect her.

And she certainly didn’t deserve to learn that the person she was supposed to run to could become the person she needed to run from.

We often use words like monster or inhuman when we hear about crimes like this.
Maybe because we want to believe people capable of such cruelty are somehow different from us.

But I don’t even want to spend time finding the perfect word for him.
Because no word can explain this.
And no word can make it less horrifying.

I only keep coming back to one question.

Why?

Why your own daughter?
Why the child who trusted you?
Why the person who believed you would protect her?
Why did you become the danger you were supposed to protect her from?

I don’t have an answer.
Maybe there isn’t one.
Maybe some acts are so cruel that searching for an explanation only makes the question hurt more.

And perhaps that is why I am writing this.

Not because I have a solution.
Not because I have some profound lesson to offer.
But because I read something today that I couldn’t just close and forget.

I am angry.
I am heartbroken.
And I am tired of how easily stories like these become numbers, headlines, court cases, and statistics.

Behind every case is someone who has to live with what happened.
Behind every headline is a human life.
And behind this one was a child who should have been safe.

The details of the crime are horrifying.
But honestly?
The betrayal itself is enough.

We don’t need to describe every terrible thing that happened to understand how terrible it was.

A father was supposed to be her safe place.
He was supposed to be the person she ran to.
He was supposed to be the person who taught her that the world could be frightening, but she would never have to face it alone.

Instead, he became the reason she needed protection.

And I don’t know what hurts more than that.

Because she was supposed to run to him.
Not from him.

MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR:

If this piece brought up difficult feelings for you:
You are not alone. What happened was not your fault. If you can, please reach out to someone you trust or a local helpline. You deserve safety, support, and care.

There is something strange about the way we read stories.

We are usually taught to look for the protagonist. We follow their pain, understand their decisions, remember their conflicts and eventually learn to see the world through their eyes.

But while reading recently, I found myself asking a slightly uncomfortable question:

What happens to everyone who doesn’t get to be the protagonist?

What if the person we call “mad” could tell us why?

What if the woman standing beside the hero had been given her own story?

What if the person we call a villain was allowed to explain themselves?

And what if the version of history we know is simply the version told by the person who had enough power to tell it?

These questions kept returning to me while thinking about three very different works: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

At first, they seem to have almost nothing in common.

But the more I thought about them, the more I noticed one thing:

They all made me question who gets to control the story.

The Vegetarian: When a choice stops belonging to you

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian begins with something that sounds almost ordinary.

A woman decides to stop eating meat.

It could have remained a personal choice.

But it doesn’t.

Yeong-hye’s decision gradually affects her marriage, her family, her body and the way everyone around her understands her.

And this was the part that stayed with me.

Her decision is never allowed to remain simply hers.

Other people interpret it.

They judge it.

They try to explain it.

They try to control what it means.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about how often women experience something similar when they make choices that fall outside what society considers acceptable.

A woman can be independent — but not too independent.

Ambitious — but not intimidating.

Different — but not so different that other people become uncomfortable.

And when she crosses that invisible boundary, how quickly do we begin searching for a label?

Difficult.

Selfish.

Rebellious.

Unstable.

Mad.

But The Vegetarian is more complicated than simply saying that a woman makes an unconventional choice and society calls her insane.

That is precisely what makes the book so disturbing.

The more we move through Yeong-hye’s story, the more we realise that her transformation cannot be reduced to one decision about food. Her body, her relationships, her memories and her refusal to behave according to other people’s expectations become entangled.

And that left me with a question:

How often do we understand a woman through the people describing her instead of allowing her to exist beyond their interpretation of her?

Animal Farm: When the story itself becomes a weapon

Then there is George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

At first, it is easy to read it simply as a story about animals who rebel against their human master.

They want freedom.

They want equality.

They want a society in which they are no longer exploited.

But Orwell doesn’t stop at the revolution.

He shows us what happens after the revolution.

And that, to me, is where the book becomes frightening.

Power changes hands.

Rules begin changing.

Words begin changing.

And eventually, even memory becomes unstable.

The animals are not only being controlled physically.

They are being taught what to believe.

This is what makes Animal Farm so powerful to me.

It asks a question that remains relevant far beyond the farm:

Who controls the story after the people have fought for change?

Because power does not always need to silence you completely.

Sometimes it only needs to control the language you use.

If someone can change the meaning of equality, they can change what equality looks like.

If someone can rewrite yesterday, they can influence what you believe happened.

If someone controls the information everyone receives, they can slowly control the reality everyone accepts.

And suddenly Animal Farm isn’t just about animals.

It is about propaganda.

It is about political power.

It is about memory.

And perhaps most importantly, it is about how easily people can lose control of their own story while believing they are still living in it.

And then there is Hamlet.

I have read Hamlet and thought about Hamlet’s grief, his anger, his relationship with his father, Claudius, his mother and Ophelia.

Hamlet occupies so much of the play that sometimes it feels as though the entire world exists around his consciousness.

And yet, while thinking about the play again, I found myself asking:

What happens if we stop looking at the story only through Hamlet?

What did Ophelia experience?

What was Gertrude’s story?

What did they understand that Hamlet didn’t?

What were their choices?

And what if we allowed their experiences to occupy the same amount of intellectual space that we give Hamlet’s?

This doesn’t mean Hamlet’s perspective is false.

It means it is one perspective.

And perhaps that distinction matters.

Ophelia is often remembered primarily in relation to Hamlet.

Gertrude is often remembered primarily in relation to Hamlet’s father and Hamlet himself.

But they are not merely supporting characters in someone else’s emotional universe.

They are people within the story.

And this is where I started thinking about something much bigger than Shakespeare.

Why are we so comfortable allowing certain characters to become the centre of a narrative while others remain permanently at its edges?

Why does the hero get complexity while the woman beside him gets a label?

Why does the protagonist get an inner world while everyone else gets interpreted through him?

Maybe this is not just a problem with literature.

Maybe it is a problem with how human beings understand each other.

Who gets to tell the story?

This is what these three works kept making me think about.

In The Vegetarian, I found myself thinking about who gets to define another person’s choices.

In Animal Farm, I thought about who gets to define reality and history.

In Hamlet, I thought about whose perspective becomes the centre of the story.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons literature survives for centuries.

It doesn’t simply tell us what happened.

It teaches us to question who is telling us what happened.

The next time we read about a “mad” woman, perhaps we should ask what happened before she was given that label.

The next time we read about a villain, perhaps we should ask who gave them that role.

The next time history gives us a single heroic version of an event, perhaps we should ask whose voice is missing.

Because sometimes the most important character isn’t the one standing in the centre.

Sometimes it is the person standing quietly at the edge.

The person who wasn’t believed.

The person who wasn’t recorded.

The person whose choices were explained by somebody else.

The person who never got to tell us what the story meant to them.

And perhaps that is why I keep coming back to literature.

Because literature doesn’t always give us answers.

Sometimes it gives us better questions.

And maybe the next time we open a book, we shouldn’t only ask:

“Who is the main character?”

Maybe we should ask:

“Who didn’t get to be one?“

It sounds harsh.

Maybe even unfair.

But at one point in my life, it was the truth I had convinced myself to believe.

Every betrayal I remembered had one thing in common.

They were women.

If someone had asked me then what I thought about feminism, I probably would have laughed. I would have said, “Why should I support something that represents the very people who hurt me?”

And honestly?

Many people would have understood.

They would have heard my story and concluded, “Villains aren’t born; they’re made.”

Pain has a strange way of making us generalize.

When enough people disappoint us, we stop blaming individuals and begin blaming entire groups.

For a long time, I wasn’t angry at a few women.

I was angry at women.

Looking back, I realize that anger wasn’t protecting me.

It was imprisoning me.

Every new friendship came with suspicion.

Every act of kindness felt temporary.

I wasn’t afraid of being hurt again.

I had simply started expecting it.

Then life did something I never expected.

A woman helped me heal.

She didn’t ask me to trust women again.

She didn’t lecture me about equality.

She didn’t try to change my opinions.

She simply treated me with kindness.

And slowly, without realizing it, she changed something far more important than my opinion of women.

She changed my opinion of people.

That was the moment I understood something I wish I had learned years earlier.

People hurt people.

People heal people.

Gender has very little to do with either.

That realization forced me to question another belief I had carried for years.

When did feminism become a topic of fight?

Somewhere along the way, a movement that began with the demand for equal rights became, in many spaces, a never-ending battle of men versus women.

Every conversation turned into a scoreboard.

Who suffers more?

Who has it harder?

Who deserves more sympathy?

Who should apologize?

But wasn’t feminism supposed to be about something much bigger than that?

The reason I can sit here and write this article today is feminism.

Not because I hate men.

Not because women are superior.

But because generations of women refused to accept a world that denied them basic rights.

If women had never understood the value of freedom, they would never have stepped beyond the walls that confined them.

They would have remained inside their homes, accepting that education was not for them.

They would have accepted that leadership was not for them.

They would have accepted that their dreams ended at the doorstep of their houses.

Instead, they questioned.

They resisted.

They challenged centuries of inequality.

Because of them, I can study.

I can publish my thoughts.

I can dream beyond the limits society once placed on women.

I can choose the life I want.

These freedoms were not gifts.

They were earned.

That, to me, is feminism.

Not superiority.

Not revenge.

Not hatred.

Just equality.

Some people think supporting feminism means standing against men.

I disagree.

To me, feminism simply means believing that a girl’s dreams deserve the same chance as a boy’s dreams.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

At the same time, equality doesn’t mean pretending men and women are identical.

It means respecting what both bring to the table.

Men and women have different experiences.

Different strengths.

Different ways of solving problems.

Different ways of loving.

Different ways of leading.

None of those differences make one gender better than the other.

They make us complementary.

The conversation was never meant to be men versus women.

It was always meant to be men and women.

Unfortunately, division has become easier than dialogue.

Not just between genders.

Between religions.

Between castes.

Between political ideologies.

Between communities.

History has shown us that when people remain divided, they stop asking the questions that truly matter.

Instead of debating how to improve education, we debate identities.

Instead of discussing employment, we fight over labels.

Instead of demanding better healthcare, affordable living, or opportunities for young people, we spend our energy proving why one side is right and the other is wrong.

When ordinary people are busy fighting each other, accountability quietly fades into the background.

Whether the division is based on gender, religion, caste, or politics, the outcome is often the same.

We forget that the problems affecting us don’t discriminate.

Inflation affects everyone.

Unemployment affects everyone.

Poor education affects everyone.

Weak healthcare affects everyone.

Those challenges don’t ask whether you’re a man or a woman.

They don’t ask your religion.

They don’t ask your caste.

They simply affect us all.

Maybe that’s why unity is so difficult.

Because division is effortless.

Healing taught me something that anger never could.

One person’s cruelty does not represent an entire gender.

One painful chapter should never become an entire philosophy.

And one movement should never be judged only by its loudest voices.

Maybe feminism was never asking us to choose between men and women.

Maybe it was asking us to choose between inequality and fairness.

Between prejudice and understanding.

Between fear and freedom.

The strongest societies are not built when one gender stands above the other.

They are built when both stand beside each other.

Because equality was never about deciding who matters more.

It was always about making sure no one matters less