Why I am Learning to Be Less Empathetic

Over the past few days, I have been noticing my growing reluctance and dislike to actively engage in the Social Media. I have become more conscious of what I am doing in that space, wondering how important it was for me to express a thought, post a picture or write a message on the timeline at a time when people in my home country were lurching between life and death.

I have been feeling a bit clunky in the heart before I posted anything. It is a problem that I had never experienced before. I have always exercised some amount of caution while interacting on Social Media, but what I was now feeling was a nebulous sense of guilt.

It crept into my consciousness, like a snake into a larder, making me wonder if I was being brazenly indifferent to the reality of a world in pain, especially because I was so incapable to do anything worthwhile to save a life or support a soul. Every time I soaked in a happy moment, broke into a smile or a song, received a praise or clinked the glass, I wondered if I was justified in relishing the occasion when thousands out there were desperate to be just alive.

Suddenly being cheerful began to feel like a crime. Happiness became an unfair advantage. I began to despise my position of small privileges.

It took a while for me to decipher that the source of my guilt lay in my deep sense of empathy. It was compassion taken to its extreme that was lancing at my heart and threatening to tip my tranquility.

But then, empathy and compassion aren’t bad things, are they? Yes, they are when left unrestrained. It is a lesson I learnt the hard way after the passing of my dad.

We attach a lot of importance to the template of empathy in our lives and rightly so. Humanity thrives on compassion alone. But when we allow that ‘feeling for the other’ beyond a justified point, it can turn into poison that will cause our wellness to decay slowly.

When I realized that I was slowly beginning to feel the widespread pain and suffering of my countrymen (including people I knew) in my bones, that it was crushing my own cultured sense of optimism, I forced myself to look away.

When I realized that the condition of those gasping for breath, those who were losing loved ones, those who were scrambling for help, those pitiful cries and pleadings were affecting my lucidity, I had to take a judicious decision about how far I was going allow myself to fuse with the scenario unfolding out there.

It was a call I had to take for own sanity’s sake.

We cannot let our empathy to convert into guilt, or worse, become our own nemesis. Empathy is a beautiful emotion that must encourage us to walk beside those who are in pain, but never make us walk the way for them. I am cognizant of the downsides of strongly identifying with others’ afflictions, but I have yet to fully learn to translate the valuable theory into practice.

I was once again on the verge of falling into the danger of adopting the other man’s suffering as my own. It happens every time I see a tragedy around me. But this time, I am working on it more consciously, carefully eschewing all that will affect my mental well-being.

I hugely owe it to myself. No, it is not being selfish, it is being rational.

I am deeply aware and concerned of what is happening. It makes me want to cry occasionally, but I quickly gather my wits and acknowledge that ‘it is what it is’.

I am also mindful of the fact that I don’t have a panacea for the ills of the world. Wishing that I had a way to help, a way to set things right is goodwill, but knowing that I don’t have much means to do it and hence to keep calm is good sense. Sooner or later, the universe will tire of its theatrics and reverse the trend.

Till such time, let me sit tight, watering my hope for better times with prayer and my writing. As of now, they are only two things that are in my capacity to do, and those I will do as best as I can, for the sake of humanity.

Jobless in Dubai

One significant thing I have learnt and fully understood in the past year is the meaning of the idiom, ‘make ends meet.’

The name Dubai conjures up images of plentitude and luxury. It is where money is known to fatten every purse. It is where dream merchants readily feed people’s greed. It is where aspiring souls from our country long to land. It is where desires manifest as make-believe happiness. It is where life sometimes resembles a mirage, and sometimes a shamaal (sandstorm).

This place is believed to administer happiness doses to all. So, no matter what happens in the rest of the world and how tortuous the times have been elsewhere, life here should be plain sailing, right?

Not for all.

Ask someone who has been out of job for a year now. Ask someone whose first thought in the morning is about the last crumbs of savings in the bank. Ask someone who has a home loan to pay in the midst of it all. Ask someone who is skimping every buck and clutching at the tiniest chance to make an extra Dirham for the corners.

Ask us.

Circumstances now are grueling everywhere, but in Dubai, it is more than difficult, because life here comes with a premium price tag. Although not on a par with New York or Hongkong, life here is still a synonym for priceyness, especially for us commoners.

We, as in the husband and I, have always been people with limited means and contained needs. Even when he was employed, we had enough; never excess.

We lived comfortably, not extravagantly.

We neither splurged nor socialized.

Because the truth is, contrary to popular belief, Dubai doesn’t offer affluence of that kind to everybody. To a majority of us, it just offers a lifestyle a few notches above what we might have had back home, allowing us a few add-ons, which is why we stay put here.

Some things we enjoy here are unimaginable elsewhere in the world. By that, I don’t mean the scented weekends at the malls and the smooth SUV rides. I mean the unmatched sense of protection and the ease of living this place provides. It is what made us stick around too, despite the drying up of income.

But has it been easy to drag from one month to the next without the pay slip? Scarcely!

We downsized an already simple living to the point of shrinking our needs to the bare essentials. We hunted for deals and offers and settled for cheaper options to survive. We stopped eating out, which was a relish in other times, but is an indulgence in this time of dearth. There were dozens of other things we stopped doing.

Life became confined to our laptops — he slogging to get his new venture going , and I teaching students back-to-back, often to the point of exhaustion. What I once did for pleasure and passion became obligatory. We had to put food on the table. There was no other thought that drove me.

Never one to hanker after wealth, I now wished I got paid for all my writing. Yes, even for the stories that people lapped up for free. I needed money, damn it! I wished people spent on my book generously. I wished people didn’t take my work for granted anymore. I wished my bones had more power so I could stretch further and keep the meter running. But there was only so much I could realistically do.

Millions were going through worse unmentionable things, so you are better off, a few counselled me. Losing a job wasn’t a disaster; people had lost bigger things, I was told.

Indeed, I am grateful for being better off than them and I deeply feel for those who have lost more. I wish I could help them, but thinking about them will not steer our ship out of the storm, will it?

Of course, people are suffering all over, but empathizing with them won’t satisfy my hunger pangs, will it? If I must be sated, I must eat. And for that, we alone must plod through the crisis. Silently. Smilingly. Without a demur. Without giving the slightest wind of our squeezed-out state to anyone because our condition is just a ‘story’ to other people to comment upon. Cribbing and crying in public don’t help because our life essentially matters only to us.

So, day after day, we had to tell ourselves happy things. We had to pump ourselves up with powerful thoughts. We had to make sure we didn’t disintegrate. With great effort, we pulled ourselves out of the red zone of despondency and slowly learned to be happy in our frugal existence.

The frustrations were many, and we let them be, without fighting. Left to their own devices, they will wither and die, we believed. Yes, belief is a big thing when everything else looks bleak. It isn’t easy, but between crumbling to pieces and holding our ground, what should one choose?

If there is one thing that I am sure of, it is this. To see light at the end of the tunnel, one has to keep walking. Staying stuck will never bring us to light. So we continue to walk, feeling the pinch every minute, but promising ourselves that one day, we will be out of the tunnel.

As we go through this phase, we are also learning new lessons. About people, about ourselves, about life, about God.

We have miles to go, but today we are taking one small step at a time led by the light inside. That we have pulled through this far is victory in its own right. Small things have happened on the way that have kept us afloat. I would call them diamond dusts of miracles. So tiny they were that you would miss them if you didn’t pay attention.

Today, there is only one way to describe our life after a year of redundancy. Like a swan. Gliding gracefully on the top and paddling fiercely beneath.

(Dedicated to all who have been through hard times, to all who made it this far. Remember, we may be in this together, but we can walk out of the tunnel only with our two feet. So keep going.)

How Stupider Can We Get?

This is not a political piece, although it can be misconstrued as one.

I am essentially apolitical and ideologically neutral, which could be an unimpressive detail on one’s intellectual profile. Apolitical people are generally considered spineless and inept and enjoy no respect in the eyes of thinkers.

Yet, I insist that I am not political. I am writing this piece as a commoner, pained beyond words to see people dying like flies back in her home country, India. It is the persistent ache in the heart that is inciting me to vent these words. It’s my deep empathy for those suffering that is speaking.

This is my catharsis on behalf of people that I know and I don’t know.

People who miraculously made it. (God bless them with good health and long life.)

People who succumbed, like a dear friend’s husband last year. Like an acquaintance’s father today.

What made us take the virulence of the virus lightly, I still can’t fathom, but it came back in fierce forms, mutating with a vengeance like the demon Raktabeej in Indian mythology. And all I can do is watch from far, like I do every single time calamity strikes my countrymen. But this time around, I am more than just distraught, for somewhere in the deepest recesses of my heart I still believe it could all have been a tad less severe. If not totally averted, we could have ducked the deadly trend, if only…

If only, good sense had prevailed — among the common folks and the powers that be. If only, man had prioritized being alive over everything else. If only we hadn’t taken the villain as just a bogeyman playing a prank on us. If only we hadn’t tricked ourselves into thinking it happened only to others, not us.

How simple it was for us to learn the lesson that if nature so desires, it can make the lives of the mighty and the meek merge at the straight line in the monitor all at once!

But we failed to learn because we had other concerns. Of politics, of religion, of personal agendas, of winning slanging matches. There was no one to tell us that none of those would matter in our absence, and that in the omniscient eyes of the rapidly mutating virus, we were an utterly foolish and easy prey.

Today, as a citizen who knows nothing except that the noose is tightening around people’s necks, choking a billion and odd lives in India, I am seeking political and social accountability.

I feel betrayed by my country’s government, as I confront a question that is repeatedly rising in my mind — didn’t the government have the option to postpone the elections? Couldn’t they haggle about power and political control a little after the Covid peak had passed? Couldn’t the political lot have contained its greed for a while in the interest of the same populace they claim to serve with their power? Yes, they could have.

That they had a choice was revealed to me today by someone in the know after I fired the question that was rankling inside me for several days. Do we have a constitutional option to postpone elections if the situation merits it?

Yes, we do, I was told.

Why then wasn’t it stalled? Why then did we, as a nation, collectively sign up for a Harakiri?

I was appalled to see visuals of tightly packed temple grounds in my native state Kerala; to see people revel in the drumbeats of death booming in the air, all in the name of piety.

As a citizen, I want to know who can be held responsible for this.

Why were a million benighted people allowed to be super-spreaders in a congregation that was given the symbolic status after the danger exploded? Why were religious festivals allowed in various parts of the nation, with complete disregard to the situation?

The answer is a no brainer. Because nothing taps into the psyche of the people as religion does, and no one risks jeopardizing its influence on power equations.

History has been a recurring witness to the monstrosity of power-crazy men, time after time. To those who thrive on political power, people are pawns. And like pawns they used us, at this critical juncture too. They used us against us, by draining our common sense, by robbing our discretion, by never once cautioning us that we were on the brink. What a mighty ride they took us on!

Now, every measure that is taken on war footing seems like a sham, because if people’s well-being was primary, these measures would have been in place long before the emergency sirens went off.

Covid, our country thought, had left, once and for all.

Covid, our countrymen thought, was a hyped disease.

Covid, we thought, was getting more attention than it deserved, so we decided to ignore it. We took Isaac Asimov’s words, ‘the easiest way to solve a problem is to ignore it’ too seriously.

It doesn’t matter to me who is in power — X, Y, or Z, and this holds true for any nation in the world. As long as people are not their priority, as long as public good is not on the agenda, their ideologies ring equally hollow in our ears. No doubt, in this instance, they led us astray and left us at sea, their selfishness got the better of them, and they all liberally ground their axes sharp.

However, on the other hand, I am also wondering if we ourselves didn’t let us down by stupidly following the pied pipers? When we could shield ourselves from acid rain, we chose to do a rain dance, because we thought we were non-corrosive and won’t be scorched.

A good friend recently advised me not to let the reality get to me and break my sobriety, for as per him, people have resigned themselves to their fate of living between a rock and a hard place, viz. self-serving politicians and fanatic followers of religion.

Although the advice was well-meaning, given to assuage me, it made me think how complacent and ignorant we had all become as a species, even in the face of adversity.

We are falling like ninepins unable to gather ourselves, and many are still going about things as if nothing can make a scratch. How stupider can we get, and how grossly indifferent?