My friend Sanjib, who lives in Seattle, flew across the country a couple of months ago. He had arranged his trip to visit relatives in the DMV area in such a fashion that he and I could meet. It was a true act of kindness - taking the time and trouble to connect, share his journey and wander down memory lane to the years we spent in Calcutta¹ working at CMC. I joined CMC right out of college; the work and the camaraderie there shaped my entire career. It brought back a lot of memories and his gesture made me dwell on little acts of kindness. It has been a couple of months and I have been thinking more deeply about kindness ever since.

You naturally learned to be kind when you were young. For instance, in my childhood it was normal for bhikshus² to come to your door and since you couldn’t differentiate the monk from the mendacious beggar, you rarely turned them away without giving them something - a few coins, rice, whatever was at hand. There was an ironic test: if you turned a true bikshu away, they simply continued silently on their path, whereas the impostor turned back to curse or scold you. It was a moral Schrödinger’s cat—the only way to reveal their true nature was to commit the unkind act of turning them away. Each encounter was a little fraught but the frequency was manageable.

In Calcutta, however, it was an entirely different story. While it was a magnificent, vibrant city - teeming with music, football, legendary food, and festivals - reminders of human misery were at every intersection. This was true of other cities such as Bombay as well. Beggars tugged at your sleeve wherever you walked. The sheer volume overwhelmed you. To function, to report to work, to navigate daily life, you had to harden yourself. You rationed your empathy carefully. You became less kind not out of malice, but because your inner bandwidth was tapped out.

These lessons in self-protection follow you around. In this moving 2013 commencement address to the graduating students at Syracuse University, the author George Saunders named failures of kindness as the primary regret of his life and offers this advice :

It is a short speech and there are text versions of it available besides the book. Read it. Saunders’s regrets were not dramatic acts of cruelty, but passive omissions like the quiet classmate he saw being marginalized and did nothing to help. You realize that the armor you built, designed to guard our own ambition and comfort, calcifies into a habit.

Today’s news almost makes you feel that we are back in the desolate world of T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland - a civilization that seems to have lost its anchor, its kindness. Eliot was writing after the First World War and I never fully understood the poem, with its varied allusions and deliberately broken style. But the poem ends with a striking call back to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

In the fifth chapter of the Upanishad, the children of Prajapati - gods, humans, and demons (asuras) - approach their creator at the end of their studies and ask for instruction. To each group, Prajapati utters the single syllable: "DA."

Eliot’s cure for the world, as he saw it in early 1920s, was to look to the Upanishads for advice. Eliot captures the essence of the trap: “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.” That prison is the armor we construct, the protective cynicism we adopted in places like Calcutta, or the frantic self-absorption Saunders warns about.

Both the poem and the Upanishad are quoted extensively below.

Kindness is not a soft sentiment; it is the deliberate, risky act of keeping ourselves open, of not choosing to avert our gaze. It is what my friend did by taking the trouble to travel across a continent to share a precious morning of memory. As the thunder reminds us across millennia: control the selfish impulse, give what you can spare, and cultivate compassion. For me, this is a work in progress.

Damyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.

Shanti shanti shanti.