SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 My grandmother never called a family meeting. But whenever something important needed to be decided — a marriage, a land dispute, a child's education — she would simply start talking. To everyone. One by one, sometimes all at once, over tea, over meals, over nothing at all. Days would pass. Opinions would surface, clash, soften, and slowly — almost without anyone noticing — a direction would emerge. Nobody felt defeated. Nobody felt steamrolled. The decision, when it finally arrived, felt less like a verdict and more like weather: something that had grown naturally out of the season. She never knew the word dialogical . But she understood it completely. When we face a hard decision — especially in groups torn by difference, in families fractured by tension, in communities divided by fear — we instinctively reach for one of two tools. We either debate , or we dialogue . They look similar from the outside. People talk, others listen, words fill the air. But underneath, they are buil...

 Think of Raju who lives about forty kilometres outside Bengaluru. He wakes before sunrise, eats a small breakfast of rice and sambar, and walks to his small patch of land. He grows enough to feed his family and sells the small surplus at the weekly market. He owns no car. He flies nowhere. He buys almost nothing new. His carbon footprint, measured against the global average, is nearly invisible.  He is not saving the planet out of virtue. He is simply living within his means. And quietly, without knowing it, he is doing the rest of us an enormous favour. Here is the uncomfortable truth that nobody in a boardroom, airport lounge, or think tank likes to say plainly: the planet is still alive largely because billions of people like Raju consume very little. The atmosphere does not know your name or your bank balance. It only counts what you burn, what you throw away, what you demand. And for most of human history — and still today — the majority of people have demanded very litt...

  John 4:43-54  presents two incidents of growing in faith; journeying from desperate, hollow faith to a mature, enduring trust in Jesus. These are stories where the miracle itself becomes secondary to what one becomes because of it; highlighting that true belief often begins in desperation but must mature into trust and surrender. The people of Galilee , for whom Jesus worked most of his miracles had no honour for him; but now receives him back. A royal official , who came to Jesus just out of sheer desperation, now believes along with whole of his household.  The turning point of the narrative is when Jesus does not perform the dramatic action the official requested. He doesn't go to the house, touch the boy, or command the fever publicly. Instead, Jesus says,  "Go, your son will live"  (John 4:50). At this moment, the official is placed in a critical juncture: to trust the  Word  of Christ or to demand his own way. The text says,  "The man beli...

 Every brain begins as a blank page. Not quite empty — the hardware is there, the neurons fired at birth — but the content, the character, the very texture of who you are: none of that exists yet. It waits to be written, education is this process. And here is the unsettling truth: it gets written whether you are paying attention or not. Show me what a child sees every day, and I will show you who they will become. Neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity — the brain's lifelong ability to rewire itself in response to experience. But you don't need the word to feel the reality. Think of the child who grows up in a home where books line every wall. Reading feels natural to her, almost like breathing. Now think of the child who grows up watching his parents solve every disagreement with silence or shouting. He has no template for talking through conflict, because he has never seen it done. Neither child chose their starting point. Both were quietly, invisibly shaped by it. Roger Fe...

 The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican ( Luke 18: 9-14 ) perfectly mirrors the spiritual crisis of Blaise Meredith in the novel The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West . At the beginning of the novel, Monsignor Blaise Meredith discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. This terminal diagnosis forces a brutal reckoning: he realises that despite being a priest and a respected canon lawyer in the Vatican, he has never truly loved, suffered with others, or experienced genuine human connection. He has hidden behind the rigid rules, paperwork, and safe bureaucracy of the Roman Curia . His faith is orthodox but entirely bloodless. His primary struggle is the terrifying realisation that he is facing death without ever having truly lived. For most of his life, Meredith unknowingly embodied the spirit of the Pharisee. The Pharisee approached God "full of himself; and he went back unchanged" . Similarly, Meredith built his life in the Roman Curia on orthodox correctness and canonic...

  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus commands His disciples with a charge that has never stopped to unsettle: “ Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect ” ( Matthew 5: 48 ). The word lands like a stone thrown into still water. Circles of interpretation ripple outward. How? In what manner? By what conceivable standard? Thirteen chapters later, the answer arrives—not as an abstraction, not as a philosophical treatise, but as a parable about a king, a debt, and a man who could not do what had been done for him (Matthew 18: 21–35). The perfection Jesus spoke of on the mountain now has a name, a shape, and a practice. It is mercy . Christian perfection is not the perfection of the philosopher—the cold ideal untouched by human frailty. It is the perfection of the Father who “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5: 45). Divine perfection is not distance from the wounded. It is inexhaustible movement toward them. Mercy...

 Learning undeniably builds one’s intelligence. Learning is difficult, and real scholarship is rare. As we undergo studies, we ourselves ask, when will I get done with it: assignments, exams, dissertations, presentation and so on. And we dismiss any further learning, saying, learning is only for the most intelligent and strongest. But history proves otherwise. People who have stayed with something long enough, arrives—it is true with education too. Think of Charles Darwin . He was not considered a brilliant student. His own father fed up of him, once seems to have said, he cares for nothing but hitting stray dogs and catching rats. Darwin himself has said that his teachers and father considered him to be 'a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. And yet, this ordinary boy developed the habit of noticing. He watched. He asked questions no one else thought to ask. He kept writing down what he noticed as a boy. And He gave the evolutionary world one of its m...

 The essence of KM Gaffoor ’s Malayalam poem Yudham ( War) could be translated this way: over small things, we lose our patience and cool, we grow in anger and revenge. When the food had a little less salt, we struck the table in frustration, and pushed the plate away. When someone gave a harsh feedback we banged the door so hard. When a glass slipped and shattered, we raised our hands in punishment. Over small things — a meal, a feedback, a mistake — we became storms. ‘This is us.’ And then we, seeing the horrors of war, ask, what is war?   Why is there war? KM Gaffoor answers it plainly: ‘War is simply us, made larger .’ War is not something that happens out there, between nations and armies and strangers on maps. War is something that happens in here — in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the spaces between people who are supposed to live with each other.

 A religious person will do what he is told, no matter what is right; where as a spiritual person will do what is right, no matter what is told. The religious person — and I mean this in the narrowest, most cautionary sense — does what he is told, not because he has understood why, but because he has been taught that understanding is unnecessary, perhaps even dangerous. Obedience becomes the highest virtue. And obedience , unchecked, has a long and terrible history. It was obedience that allowed ordinary German soldiers to operate concentration camps. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — she expected to find a monster. What she found instead was a quiet, rather dull bureaucrat who kept repeating, almost plaintively, that he had only been following orders. She called it the banality of evil . Evil, she observed, does not always come dressed in malice. Sometimes it comes dressed in compliance . A...

  Performative leadership is a style of management where individuals prioritise the appearance of being a leader over the actual responsibility of leading. Often described as leadership theatre , it focuses on high-visibility actions, such as public speeches or symbolic gestures, that lack substantive follow-through or real impact on the team's well-being and productivity.  Common Signs of Performative Leadership are: Language without follow-through or intention : long speeches and frequent use of buzzwords like "transparency," "empowerment," or " psychological safety " in presentations, with no changes in day-to-day operations. Over-reliance on optics and visibility : a heavy focus on how initiatives will be perceived externally or by superiors, rather than how they are experienced by the team. Scripted vulnerability : sharing personal struggles or failures in a way that feels rehearsed or "PR-ready," avoiding any real emotional risk. Feedb...

  Hannah Arendt , a German and American historian and philosopher, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century, diagnosed it plainly: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution." She was talking about what power does to the human animal. There is a particular kind of freedom that belongs only to people who have not yet won anything. The student who hasn't yet built a career can say anything about the system. The artist without a reputation can make work that offends everyone. The activist without an institution behind them can demand the impossible. Their radicalism is not just ideological — it is structural . They can afford it. The cost of speaking the truth is low when you have nothing built that the truth could demolish. This is why every great movement in history has been led by young people, by the poor, by the recently arrived, by those the existing order has already written off. They were...

  Haruki Murakami , a Japanese author, said this in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . He was writing about something as ordinary as a sore body during a long-distance race . But like all simple sentences that stay with you, it was really about something much larger — about being alive. Pain and suffering sound like the same thing. We use them almost interchangeably. But Murakami is pointing at a gap between them — a small but life-changing gap. Pain is what happens to you. Your knee hurts. You lose someone you love. A dream falls through. The world does this to you whether you agree to it or not. It does not ask permission. It does not wait until you are ready. Pain is the tax of being human. Suffering , though, is what happens inside you, after the pain arrives. It is the story you tell yourself about the pain. It is the weight you strap onto it. It is the question you keep asking — Why me? Why now? Why this? — even though no answer is coming. Sufferin...

  Ego is the voice inside us that says ‘I’ — loudly, persistently, and almost always at the expense of ‘we.’ It goes by many names: pride, self-importance, confidence, self-esteem. Spiritual teachers across traditions have called it the false self , the small self, the self we must outgrow. Whatever the name, the behaviour is the same. Ego grasps. It reaches for power, money, position, recognition — not because these things are wrong in themselves, but because ego can never hold enough of them. It is a hunger with no bottom. It never arrives. It never says: this is enough. Richard Rohr puts it starkly: for ego, everything is a commodity. Everything can be acquired, traded, leveraged. Even God. In Matthew 20: 20–28 , a mother comes to Jesus with a request. She wants her two sons — James and John — to sit at his right and left hand when he comes into his Kingdom. It is a breathtaking ask. And what makes it more than a footnote is the way she asks it. She kneels. She adopts the pos...

 Think about the last real argument you had — with a partner, a friend, a colleague. While they were still mid-sentence, something in your brain had already started its engine. You were finding the flaw, preparing your counter, mentally lining up your words. You heard sounds, but you weren't really there. This is the first kind of listening the document describes: listening that is already formulating its response. It's egoistic. Its whole point is to win. This isn't because we're bad people. It's because our ego is frightened. If what they're saying is true, something we believe might have to die. And the ego doesn't die quietly. The second kind of listening looks civilised — and it is. But just barely. This is the polite dinner-table version. We wait. We don't interrupt. We nod at appropriate moments. But underneath, both people are just taking turns broadcasting . You speak. I wait. Then I say what I was going to say anyway. Two monologues wearing the...