SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

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Belongingness as a Requirement for Faith | John 10: 22–30

How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. There is an impatience in this demand that sounds, on the surface, like honest seeking. Just tell us. Be clear. But Jesus does not receive it as honest seeking; and he is right not to. He has told them. The works he had done have spoken. The signs have been shown. The feeding, the healing of the blind man, the raising of the dead; none of it has been ambiguous. The problem was never a lack of clarity. The problem was a lack of belonging. There is a difference between a question asked in order to find an answer, and a question asked in order to resist an answer. The crowd at Solomon's Colonnade had already organised their resistance. They had taken up stones. They had convened investigations. They had cast out the man born blind for daring to testify. The question, tell us plainly , was not an open hand extended toward truth. It was a closed fist, demanding that Jesus incriminate himself in words ...

The Light That Refuses to Condemn | John 12: 44–50

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is the story of three brothers, passion (Dmitri), reason (Ivan), and spiritual compassion (Alyosha), struggling with the existence of God and moral responsibility in a world where their father, a repulsive squanderer, is murdered. Dmitri takes the path of violence and drunkenness. The spiritually gifted elder Zosima, near death, bypasses the other two brothers and bows his head to the ground before the young man who was brash, drunken, and violent, now tormented by guilt. The gesture bewilders everyone in the room. The gesture recognises Zosima’s powerlessness to condemn another; it upholds Dmitri's potential for spiritual awakening and activate Dmitri's own conscience, forcing him to confront his inner conflict. Zosima’s bow serves as a radical act of faith in humanity. Jesus, in John 12:44–50, does something remarkably similar; not with a gesture, but with a declaration that cuts against every instinct of power and religion that su...

The Rocket Has No Pilot: On the Primacy of Process in Building Enduring Organisations

S. Somanath , the ISRO 's Director, was in the midst of an interview, when the interviewer asked him about the experience of controlling a rocket from the earth station; he replied, "A launched rocket cannot be controlled. Only till countdown zero we can control it. Everything is set in it as a process, it runs as it is programmed." When Somanath uttered these words the interviewer was visibly stunned. The admission seemed almost reckless: that one of the most complex machines ever built by human hands, carrying perhaps a nation's pride and years of scientific effort, is — once launched — entirely beyond human intervention. No joystick. No remote pilot. No commander barking real-time orders from mission control. The men and women seated at their consoles, with their headsets and glowing screens, are, in Somanath's own words, only "observing anxiously at what is being unfolded." And yet, the rocket flies. It corrects its own trajectory. It separates its...

"I Am the Bread of Life" | John 6: 22–40

A crowd, who had ate their fill from Jesus’ miracle of the loaves, crossing the sea, still hungry, still looking for the man who had fed them with five loaves and two fish, is met with a statement so layered in meaning that two thousand years of theology have not yet exhausted it: "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." We tend to receive these words as a declaration of divine grandeur, and so they are. But if we stop there; if all we do is marvel at the claim and feel the swell of religious pride, then we have eaten the label on the bread and left the bread itself untouched. In almost every culture, claims of identity carry within them the seeds of exclusion. When a person says, "I have bread," there is always an unspoken second sentence: "...and you do not." Possession becomes a wall. Status becomes a defense. Even religious identity, across history, has functioned this way;...

The Wounded Child in the Leader's Chair

There is a peculiar tragedy that plays out in the corridors of power, in boardrooms, in political offices, in institutions of every kind; and it is this: the person who sits in the chair of authority is often not entirely the person your plain eyes see. Behind the grey hair, aged temples, the measured speech, the decades of experience, there is sometimes a much younger soul still keeping score. When encountering or confronting a person whom the leader had a difference of opinion or was in loggerhead with long ago, the old scores and scoreboards return. It is as psychologists admit, “When an old wound gets triggered, you don't act your age, you act the age you were hurt.” Leadership, by its very nature, arrives late in ones lice. It is the harvest of a long life, of learning, of failure, of persistence, of accumulating wisdom through seasons of struggle. A person becomes a leader at fifty, at sixty, sometimes later, carrying with them what feels like the full weight of everything ...

The Loneliness of Being the Light | John 3: 16-21

A quote on existential life goes like this, you are a rose –a beautiful rose, but people love lilies. There is a particular kind of suffering that has no name in most languages; the suffering of being exactly what the world actually in need of, and being rejected for it. You offer a rose. They want a lily. You hold out your open hand. They prefer the closed fist. This is not ordinary rejection. Ordinary rejection wounds the ego. This kind of rejection wounds something deeper, it strikes at the very substance of what you are . You cannot stop being a rose to become a lily. You cannot unmake your own nature. And so you stand, fully yourself, in a world that looks past you, through you, around you, searching for the very opposite of what you embody. Jesus knew this pain with perfect clarity. And in John 3:16–21, He did not flinch from naming it. Verse 19 is one of the most quietly devastating sentences ever written, Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of ...

Remembering Ambedkar on Ambedkar Jayanti

The article, Ambedkar and the Quest for India's Spiritual Heritage, by Harish S Wankhede, argues that BR Ambedkar's engagement with Buddhism was not merely a spiritual choice — it was a deliberate act of political and historical reclamation. By converting to Buddhism, Ambedkar sought to position Dalits not as subordinates within the Hindu fold, but as the rightful heirs of a pre-Brahmanical civilisation rooted in equality and dignity. Ambedkar imagined the Buddhist era as a "Golden Age" of egalitarianism that predated Brahmanical dominance. His Navayana Buddhism drew from diverse socio-religious traditions to offer Dalits an alternative cultural and intellectual identity — one that didn't seek to reform Hinduism from within, but to bypass it entirely. His 1956 mass conversion at Nagpur, accompanied by 22 vows, was framed as a formal declaration of independence from Hindu orthodoxy. Ambedkar was not alone in this project. Several regional movements shared his visi...

Fifty Years of Making, and Still not Going Wild

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that no one warns you about. It is not the exhaustion of doing too much. It is the exhaustion of always doing less than you know you are capable of, and knowing, with absolute clarity, exactly why. For over 20 years I have been a creator. A visual artist trained in the discipline, formed by it, living inside it even when life tried to arrange itself around everything else. And for most of those fifty years, I have been swimming upstream, against the current of institutional falling inline, priestly duty, community suspicion, administrative necessity, and the quiet, persistent pressure of people who love you but do not quite understand what it is you are trying to do. This is not a complaint. It is a reckoning. The ancient Chinese called it as rowing against the current. If you stop, you do not stay still. You go backward. The artist who tries to create within an institution, within a vocation, within a web of obligations and relationships a...

Conversation, Walking, and Breaking of Bread Together | Luke 24: 13-35

For Cleopas and his companion Jerusalem had become a city of collapsed hopes. They had laid everything, their understanding of the Messiah, their vision of liberation, their salvation on the life of one man; and now that man was dead. The crucifixion had not merely taken a life; it had taken the world of these apostles. And so they leave to Emmaus. Not in rage, but in the quiet devastation of people who have decided, almost politely, that there is no reason to stay. And yet, and here is the grace, they do not stop talking. This is what saves them, initially. Not faith, not clarity, not courage, but conversation. They are discussing and debating as they walk, and it is this very openness of speech that creates the opening for the stranger to draw near. In Homer's Odyssey , Odysseus survives not because he is the strongest or even the most faithful, but because he is the most curious, he keeps speaking, keeps asking, keeps engaging even when the gods have turned against him. They ...

Apostola Apostolorum— the Apostle to the Apostles | John 20: 11-18

While eleven solid young men hid behind locked doors in fear, a woman walked alone to a tomb in the dark. And it is to her , not to Peter, not to John, not to any of the Twelve, that the Risen Christ chose first to appear (John 20: 11-18). Thomas Aquinas , who was not known for his generosity toward women in theological roles, nonetheless called her apostola apostolorum the apostle to the apostles, and recognised this as a title of genuine honour. For Aquinas, the mode of apostolicity matters: she was sent, she proclaimed, she was believed. John 20 is the most quietly radical passage in all four gospels. Read it carefully and you notice that the resurrection narrative does not begin with a council of high priests, a gathering of the Twelve, or a male voice of authority. It begins with a woman, alone, weeping, in a garden, before dawn. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark; the darkness is not merely meteorological. It is existential. The disciples have scattere...

As Jesus Had Said, HE IS RISEN—How Was He So Sure?

Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. The Lord is risen. As He had said, He is risen. Those who do not have a Christian faith, even those reading the gospels as pure literature, will finally fall back into their chair with relief and a triumphant wow—no, everything is not over. Jesus unfolds, he reveals, a little more of the great journey of life—the resurrection. As humans first we become aware of life, and then we experience death. Most of us stop there, in doubt, skepticism, cynicism, agnosticism, atheism, and the list could go on. Jesus, through the event of his resurrection tells us, do not stop there, life continues into resurrection. Resurrection could be understood two ways. Resurrection Is the Central Blueprint of the Cosmos What Jesus revealed through the paschal mystery — the life, death and resurrection of Jesus — is the revelation of the universal pattern of things. He summarises it this way: order > disorder > reorder (life > death > ...

Resurrection Puts Life Back on Greater Track

Death had overpowered the world for a while, symbolically meaning from the first parents who listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden to the fulfillment of the promise of a saviour, people lived in the valley of death, valley of sin. The question was who will save us from sin and death? The same question is asked in the gospels as “who will roll back the stone for us.” They had even kept guards, lest the dead man walk. On the Easter morning, women go to the tomb of Jesus, and find the stone already rolled back, not by our merit, or not one of us rolled the stone back; they look in and see that the tomb is empty. According to Matthew, they meet a man there, or an angel there who told them, “as he had said, He is Risen.” Word spreads. Silence is broken, people began to speak again, the apostles began to walk and run again, they began to gather again. This is Easter morning. Resurrection of Jesus literally brought life back on track. The ancient foe is defeated. The apost...