Kamal Ghorui
Empathy and sympathy, those elegant words we casually toss around between a motivational quote and a cup of tea, are supposed to be natural. Like breathing. Or judging relatives at weddings.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: empathy is not always inborn, environmental conditioning matters a lot in moulding a person into an empath. Sometimes, it is edited out by apathetic parents. Surgically removed during childhood, like a cyst that might become cancerous later. The upbringing is based on the holy gospel: “Stay away from others’ pain, bury your head in the sand. Their problem is theirs not for yours to care for.”
And then I have seen some people marry into it.
First comes the the remote-control philosophy. In my friend Jia’s house, the television remote has a very specific emotional function.
A character on screen is about to die: click.
A news anchor begins reporting a rape case: click.
War. Floods. Starvation. Human suffering in high definition: click click click.
The channel is changed by her husband and they land, safely, on a stand-up comedian making jokes that don’t land. But that’s alright. No one is dying there. No one is crying. No one is asking uncomfortable questions like, “How does this make you feel?”
Feelings, you see, are not part of the entertainment package.
Over time, I realised there is a system at work. A deeply efficient one: the carpet theory of life.
Everything unpleasant, like illness, old age, grief, injustice is swept under a carpet.Not an ordinary carpet, mind you.This one is grand. Expansive. Almost magical in its elasticity. It stretches to accommodate everything, every ignored tear, every silenced discomfort, every moment that might demand empathy.I sometimes imagine it to be larger than those vast, ornate carpets you see in places like the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, except this one isn’t woven with craftsmanship, but with denial. And it works beautifully.
Life remains smooth. Undisturbed. Spotless.
The thing about empathy is, it needs rehearsal. It grows in small, ordinary moments. When a child is told, “Look, that person is hurting” When discomfort is not dismissed, but gently held. But what if you grow up in a space where others’pain is treated like bad weather? Something to avoid or else it will smear our world with agony.Then you don’t learn to pause.
You learn to move on.
Swiftly. Efficiently. Almost elegantly.
And so, you become an adult who looks away, not out of cruelty, but out of habit. A child with special needs becomes something you don’t know how to engage with. Suffering becomes something you don’t know how to process.
Because no one ever taught you the language.
Now here’s where it stops being observational and starts becoming personal.
There are conversations that don’t exist in Jia’s world.
She couldn’t talk about what happened at RG Kar Medical College, the horror of it, the anger, the helplessness, because the moment she began, she could almost hear the mental remote clicking. Jia couldn’t mourn out loud when someone like KK leaves us so suddenly. When an entire nation pauses in collective grief, she found herself quiet. Contained. As if her sadness needs permission.
And that loneliness is a strange one. There’s nothing poetic about this kind of loneliness where your feelings have to be borne in silence, as if it would otherwise be a venomous obtrusion.
So people like Jia develop two emotional selves. One that feels everything, deeply, instinctively, inconveniently. And another that edits, filters, softens, before anything is spoken aloud.
They learn to grieve in private. To react internally. To carry the weight quietly, pour out the grief into journals, because there is nowhere to place it.
And the irony?
The world applauds this.
“Such a positive person,” they say.
“Doesn’t dwell on negativity.”
Of course not. “Negativity” has been professionally evicted.
When I see such individuals who have been nurtured to evade such emotions, they don’t realise that empathy is not just about feeling for distant strangers on a screen.
It is about making space for the person sitting next to you. And when that space doesn’t exist, something seems amiss. Just a throbbing, persistent awareness that while life may be comfortable, something essential is missing. Because the real tragedy is not that the world is full of suffering.
It’s that, sometimes, we are taught to look away from it. And worse, to expect the people we love to look away with us.
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