The question returns like an old echo in the walkways of the human soul: What can one person do? Not shouted in defiance, but whispered in weariness. I have heard it too often—posed by good men and women who find themselves overwhelmed by the world’s harshness, dismayed by its injustices, and perhaps most hauntingly, paralysed by the fear that they are too small to make any dent in its great, groaning machinery.

There is a peculiar despair that afflicts the modern man—what psychologists might call learned helplessness, but what I believe is more accurately a poverty of imagination. The world has taught us, relentlessly, that only the grand matters—the institution, the influencer, the revolution. And yet, history teaches the opposite: that evil creeps not by armies alone but by the silence of the good; that hope is often kindled not by thunder, but by a candle lit in an unseen room.

It was on such a reflection that I wandered one warm afternoon with my youngest cousin through the polished marble halls of a luxury mall. As the harsh sun gave way to a gentler dusk, the air of London turned cool and almost forgiving. We stopped to purchase shoes at Salvatore Ferragamo and were soon swept into coffee and conversation with two of his classmates.

The boys—young, intelligent, talkative—rambled through a litany of modern passions: cars, algorithms, championships, and boasts. My cousin was largely silent. But I have come to understand that silence is not always the absence of thought; more often, it is the presence of discernment. He, unlike many, did not need to prove his presence by volume.

My cousin is a paradox of the sort that modern psychology rarely accounts for: a soul both rooted and free. He is possessed of a strong body, sharpened by athletics and discipline, and yet governed by a tender spirit—one capable of laughter, of kindness, and of clarity. He will enter a rugby field with bruising force, and emerge bloodied but calm, speaking to me not of pain, but of joy. And even when I—driven by the anxious love of an older brother—scolded him for such recklessness, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said gently, “I understand, big bro. But the game is such, and I’ll be careful next time.”

Now, it may seem a small thing, this restraint, but it reveals something of greater import. In a world intoxicated with self-expression, he possesses self-possession. He does not argue when he can persuade with peace. He does not boast, for he knows who he is.

And on that same afternoon, I watched him do something simple, yet infinitely telling. Two elderly women were struggling up the ramp toward the café. He rose instantly, moved his chair aside, and gestured for them to take our table. They declined with warmth, but the gesture lingered. His friends, however, scoffed.

“Only pansies behave courteously,” said one.

I saw my cousin smile—not in scorn, but with the gentleness of one who sees through the smoke of bravado. “What if she were your grandmother?” he asked.

“She wasn’t,” they retorted.

No argument followed. Only a silence, which he accepted without resentment. Later, he confided in me, “I don’t mind the jokes, big bro. It’s the fear behind them that saddens me. They are afraid of seeming weak. But they don’t see that goodness is not weakness—it’s strength disciplined by love.”

And there it was—the answer. The very answer I had been seeking, not for my diary or my article, but for myself. We often look for wisdom among grey beards and gilded titles, but sometimes, it comes from the mouth of one ten years your junior, holding a glass of orange juice with the serenity of a monk.

He spoke further. “I think,” he said, “if I were a doctor during a plague, I would feel heartbroken that I couldn’t save them all. But I would still do what I could for the few I could reach. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

It is. And this, I think, is where we most deeply err—not in our lack of action, but in our false belief that only large actions matter. Yet our Lord Himself, in that oft-forgotten parable, did not commend the man who ruled nations, but the one who offered a cup of cold water in His name. There is no scale of value in the moral life—only faithfulness.

Philosophy has long debated the concept of agency—how much we are truly able to will and act upon the world. Modern determinists would say we are but the sum of cause and effect. But I have never yet seen a deterministic explanation that could account for love, or for courage. When my cousin offered his chair, he defied the world’s economics. He gained nothing. He acted not from strategy, but from character.

And herein lies the great mystery: character is not formed in public, but in secret. It is not taught by lectures, but by example. And though it may go unnoticed, it is never insignificant. One person of integrity, acting with quiet courage, is a lighthouse to many in stormy waters.

As we walked to the car that evening, I wrapped my arm around him, not merely as a brother, but as a fellow pilgrim. I saw in him the union we all desire—to be modern, yes, but not rootless; to be bold, but not callous; to be joyful, and yet grounded in something ancient and good.

Many who read this may prefer tales of celebrity, actors or athletes adorned with fame. But I, for one, find more hope in the untelevised gestures of ordinary people whose goodness is not performed, but lived. My cousin is no saviour. He knows, with the humility of true strength, that he cannot redeem the world. But he speaks when he must. He listens when he ought. And he acts when others pause in indifference.

This is what one person can do. They can be a moral compass in a drifting age. They can remind us that though we cannot do everything, we must not, therefore, do nothing. In a world growing ever louder, they can keep a quiet fire burning.

And for those still waiting for the right time, the perfect audience, the grand platform—perhaps you need none of these. Perhaps all that is required is to speak, when truth calls; to act, when kindness urges; to live, in such a way that someone else watching might dare to do the same.

For though we are small, our choices are not.

And the world, in the end, is changed not by the great events, but by the great souls who live quietly among us, choosing the good because it is good—even when no one is watching. For it is always the smallest lights that pierce the darkest nights.

Picture: Portrait of Two Friends by Italian artist Pontormo, c. 1522

It is a grievous mistake to suppose that hatred is congenital—that it arrives with the child, like a birthmark or the shape of the nose. No, hatred is not a blood-born inheritance, but an infection of the soul, introduced by suggestion, nourished by imitation, and hardened by years of unexamined grievance. We are not born clutching hatred in our tiny fists. Rather, it is pressed into them by those who came before—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes with malevolence that masquerades as tradition.

If one consults the findings of prevailing psychology—as I occasionally do, though not uncritically—one finds that children, left to their own devices, exhibit no innate animosity toward the stranger. They must be taught who to fear, and more importantly, who to blame. It is as Rousseau once lamented: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Hate is one such chain—cold, deliberate, and forged not by nature but by nurture’s more sinister hand.

This notion—that hatred is acquired—does not comfort as one might wish. The truth seldom does. There is something profoundly unsettling in the knowledge that what corrodes our common life is not some wild impulse, but rather something cultivated, like a garden of weeds left to thrive in the corners of our souls.

Throughout the years, I have turned this stone over countless times in my mind: what is it that we truly hate, and why? Each time I believe I have found its root, it eludes me—like some nocturnal creature burrowing deeper into the thickets of the human heart. Hatred is nothing if not clever. It dresses itself in the garments of loyalty, of patriotism, even of justice. But if one dares to strip away the masks—however delicately—they will discover fear. Fear is the face that hatred dares not show, and yet it is always there: primal, shivering, unresolved.

Freud, in his somewhat gloomy wisdom, might have called this a projection—the self’s trembling transposed onto the face of the Other. Kierkegaard, too, spoke of this shadowy unease—an existential dread that, when denied, curdles into aggression. How often have we seen men lash out not because they are evil, but because they are afraid, and cannot admit it?

Now I must confess—my life, by most measures, has been comfortable. This comfort, far from being a refuge, poses its own peril. Hatred does not always thrive in the crucible of suffering. Sometimes it germinates in the plush quietude of privilege, where imagination atrophies and the sufferings of others become invisible. In such a state, one ceases not only to feel, but to see.

Rawls warned us against the complacency that privilege breeds—a kind of moral sleepwalking, where one mistakes the silence of injustice for the harmony of peace. The soul, dulled by comfort, becomes fertile soil for suspicion, for resentment, and ultimately, for hate.

But let us not delude ourselves with the modern superstition that hatred can be exorcised through legislation or silenced with slogans. The roots of hatred are too old and too deep for such measures. It cannot be defeated merely by policy; it must be confronted in the quiet moments of honesty—where one dares to ask, not “Who do I hate?” but “What fear am I trying to bury?”

I have been asked, often with subtle accusation, whether I harbour hatred toward those who malign my faith. The question itself is a snare. It demands a binary where there is none. I do not hate those who revile me—not out of saintliness, but because I refuse to let their darkness dictate the weather of my soul. As the Stoics rightly said, it is not what happens to us that matters, but how we respond. And to respond with hatred is to surrender one’s sovereignty.

There is, too, a kind of meanness that arrives with a smile. It is the nastiness of the polite persecutor—the one who questions your legitimacy with the soft cadence of civility. Here we encounter what the sociologists call symbolic violence, but which the Christian would simply call hypocrisy cloaked in charm. These are the hardest faces to confront, for they wear the mask of concern while slipping poison into the wine.

And yet the fault, dear reader, is not only in them—it is also in us. We inhabit a world that rewards noise and punishes nuance. In such a world, to hate is easier than to think. We scroll, we sneer, we shout. We are reactive, not reflective. And in this tyranny of immediacy, the quiet disciplines of charity, patience, and introspection are trampled beneath the feet of spectacle.

Consider the upheavals that erupt in response to perceived slights. They may seem disproportionate to some. But people do not riot over trifles. They riot because something deep and sacred has been bruised. This does not justify their violence—but it does demand our understanding. It is too easy for the West to scorn such reactions, forgetting that its own past is riddled with witch hunts, lynchings, and book burnings.

It is a grave error to think of hate as merely a sentiment. It is, in its most potent form, a structure—a system that defines the margins and exalts the centre. The furore over books, films, and ideologies is not always about the content itself, but what that content awakens: old wounds, buried shames, and ancestral shadows. Jung was right—what is denied in the collective returns with a vengeance, demanding to be seen.

And now, in our digital coliseums, hatred has found new arenas—amplified, monetised, and algorithmically curated. The same hand that scrolls for entertainment can now be enlisted in campaigns of vilification. Words become weapons. Civility becomes weakness. And truth becomes whatever sells.

This is not merely unfortunate—it is dangerous. When free expression is strangled in the name of safety, or criticism mistaken for hate, we do not diminish hatred; we give it a masquerade. Nietzsche warned us of this—of ressentiment, where morality becomes a tool of vengeance, not virtue.

It is tempting to meet provocation with silence or sarcasm. But if I could, I would rather sit at table with the provocateur—not to shout, but to question. What do you gain by wounding the already wounded? What glory is there in deepening division?

This, I believe, is not naïveté. It is a form of survival. Societies do not endure by suppressing conflict, but by transforming it into conversation. The alternative is not peace, but fracture.

History has taught us, time and again, what lies at the end of such fractures—Bosnia, Rwanda, Germany. When men cease to speak truthfully and listen charitably, the abyss opens beneath their feet.

To be tolerant, in such a time, is not to be limp or listless. It is to practise a discipline—an act of will, even of courage. It is to bear the sting of insult without recoiling into vengeance. But tolerance is not the same as acquiescence. I will not strike you for disagreeing with me—but neither will I flatter your falsehoods.

True freedom, as Spinoza knew, lies not in reacting blindly, but in understanding deeply. Frankl, too, saw that between stimulus and response there is a space—and in that space lies our power, our dignity, our humanity.

To be tolerant is not to be passive. It is to walk the narrow ridge between cowardice and fanaticism. It is to love the truth more than one’s comfort, and justice more than one’s reputation.

And here, perhaps, lies my deepest unease with the contemporary secular vision. It claims to celebrate diversity, but too often it demands uniformity in return. It opens the gates, but only to those who sing its tune. In such a theatre, the truly dangerous man is not the fanatic, but the thinker—the one who dares to dissent, to doubt, to ask questions that are not pre-approved.

But maybe danger is necessary. Camus spoke of the rebel—the one who says “no” not to destroy, but to affirm a deeper “yes” to the dignity of man. It is often the dangerous ones who rouse the world from its sleep.

And sometimes, the most dangerous thing of all is to be still. To step out of the dance, to resist the rhythm of outrage, and to think. In a world of performance, reflection becomes rebellion.

For in the end, wisdom does not lie in echoing the prejudices of our forebears. It lies in questioning them. And when we do, we become more than mere heirs of anger—we become architects of something nobler.

This, I believe, is the task set before us—not to abolish hate by decree, but to disarm it by courage, by charity, and above all, by truth.

It is a grievous yoke, this burden of borrowed blame—
a collar fastened not by hand but by suspicion’s iron whim.
Each time some wayward soul, bearing a surname that resonates mine,
trips the wires of wrong,
the whole damn nation tilts its gaze—
not toward justice, but toward us.

Us.
The dusky-skinned, the mosque-born,
the ones with crescent moons in names,
whose mothers prayed in tongues too foreign for prime-time comfort.
Suddenly, we are all summoned.
Summoned to the dock of national conscience
to account for sins we neither conjured nor condoned.

They demand an arena of shame—
lip-wrung condemnations,
flag-wrapped fealties,
a parade of disavowals
that must be louder, sharper, more breathless than before.
As though the volume of our denials might absolve us
of crimes not ours.

And I must speak, not softly but starkly:
I am no confessor for a stranger’s sins.
No tribunal sits above my brow.
I owe no one the hippodrome of guilt.
The sun rises without my bidding,
and so too do the madmen fall—without my nod.

I am Indian. Not as an addendum.
Not pencilled in the margin of someone else’s belonging.
But wholly, fiercely, undeniably so.
My veins carry the dust of Bhagat Singh,
the perspiration of Ambedkar,
the silence of every unmarked grave
that nationalism buried and forgot.

Do not ask me to audition
for a passport already inked in sacrifice.
Do not hand me the script of the apologetic native,
for I shall not read it.

Let this be clear as broken glass:
A man’s faith does not annul his rights.
A man’s skin does not tether him to another’s shadow.
Identity is not inherited crime.
It is forged—in thought, in constancy, in scars.

Let us speak, then, of unrest—
of the state that forgets its promise,
that stirs the pot of division
and calls it patriotism.
Of ministers with tongues forked
like colonial serpents,
charming the poor with gods and guns
while coffers burst unseen.

Let us not forget the riots fed on rumour,
the lynchings filmed for Facebook fame,
the laws tilted like bent scales
toward temples and terror.

In such an amphitheatre of control,
what madness to demand that we perform purity?

Enough.
Enough of this Pavlovian shame,
of being summoned to cry on cue,
to swear loyalty not to a land—
but to the lie that we do not already belong.

Do you not see?
The question is not whether we are Indian enough,
but whether this India remembers what that means.

So hear me now—
I am Indian in every breath I take,
every grave I’ll return to,
every injustice I’ll fight till my bones are ash.
I will not lower my voice
so others may raise their fears.

I will not apologise for my name,
nor for the noise it makes in narrow throats.

This land is mine—
not because I say so,
but because it is written in the soil,
in sweat, in struggle,
in the quiet, unmoving certainty
of those who stayed
even when the nation turned its back.

This is the beginning.
And that—regardless of your stare—
is also the end.

The Four Numbers

It was upon an afternoon of no particular distinction, save for the city’s habitual melancholy drizzle — the sort of rain that neither cleanses nor commits — that my business partner and I found ourselves seated in the sombre glow of a rather pretentious café, the kind that trades more in the illusion of taste than in taste itself.

We were awaiting the arrival of a man whose reputation preceded him like the shadow of an overgrown monument — one Mr. Sarkar, a self-anointed luminary in the delicate art of modern marketing, whose name was uttered in business circles with the same reverence one reserves for authors of obscure but authoritative tomes. He arrived, as such men always do, precisely ten minutes late, as though to punctuate the world’s dependency on his counsel.

No sooner had we exchanged the requisite civilities — that thin, inelastic veneer which keeps the apparatus of human intercourse from rusting entirely — than we surrendered to him our modest visiting cards, tokens of identity in a world increasingly estranged from the concept.

Mr. Sarkar, with the solemnity of an antiquarian appraising a relic, held the small card at arm’s length and squinted through spectacles so thick they might have served as the portholes of a bathysphere.

“Ah,” he mused aloud, his voice oiled with self-satisfaction, “and what, pray, is the cryptic significance of these four numerals adorning your emblem? One seldom encounters arithmetic in the wild, outside the grubby ledgers of commerce.”

My business partner, a man of quiet but immovable composure, replied with unembellished clarity, “They are birthdays.”

Mr. Sarkar’s eyebrows, two grey caterpillars of ungoverned curiosity, arched theatrically. “Birthdays?” he echoed, as though the word were an ancient rune.

“Yes,” my business partner said, “ours.”

A silence, heavy and condescending, hung between us, broken only by the clink of a spoon against porcelain, like the prelude to some minor revelation.

Then came the question — tossed out with the nonchalance of a man who has long since ceased to regard the dignity of his fellow creatures as worthy of protection.

“Oh, really? Are you homos?”

There it was — the ghastly question, delivered with the elegance of a boot to the face, as though human connection could be so neatly dissected and catalogued, as if the unfathomable breadth of human friendship were a specimen to be pinned under glass.

My business partner, never one to dignify the grotesque with offense, replied with a calmness that could only be described as charitable.

“I am afraid we are not.”

There was a quiet magnificence in the way he said it, as if brushing a speck of dust from the lapel of decency. I noticed then how small Mr. Sarkar looked — a man diminished not by stature but by the architecture of his thoughts, a mind furnished entirely with the fragile trinkets of prejudice and presumption.

The conversation moved on, as conversations do, like a leaf carried downstream, away from the sharp stones that first unsettled it. But something had shifted. The veil had been drawn back for a fleeting second, revealing the shabbiness of a soul addicted to the comfort of categories and the safety of sneers.

It is, I have since learned, the peculiar plight of the unmarried and unattached man, whose very existence invites the world’s morbid curiosity — a creature viewed less as an individual and more as an anomaly to be explained away with gossip or derision. In some eyes, solitude is not a state but a suspicion.

And so, the four numbers remained on the card — unyielding, unashamed — quiet sentinels of our united histories, which, unlike Mr. Sarkar’s certainties, required neither explanation nor apology.

The Curious Case of Imagination and Pettiness

I found myself musing, not without a measure of dismay, upon the curious mechanism by which a man — a stranger to us, no less — could vault so hastily from ignorance to insinuation, and that too with such barren imagination. What obscure defect of mind or spirit, I wondered, had permitted such an empty and premature extrapolation to pass, unexamined, from his lips? One might have supposed that the years, which are intended by nature to mellow the mind as the sun ripens the fruit, would have endowed him with at least the rudiments of discernment, if not wisdom. And yet, it seems, time had left him curiously untouched, as though his thoughts had aged in body but not in depth.

But upon more sober reflection, I could scarcely lay the fault at his feet alone. He was, in the end, but a mirror — polished, perhaps, but nevertheless faithful — reflecting the wafer-thin mentality so fashionable in our age; an era wherein the soul is urged at every turn to exchange wonder for cynicism, and where the impulse for genuine exploration is starved by the baser appetite for derision. There appears to be, deep in the circuitry of the modern mind, some unfortunate miswiring which prompts otherwise unremarkable people to derive their small, nasty pleasures not from understanding but from the squalid thrill of speaking first and thinking — if ever — much, much later.

Had the places been reversed — had I been the one to encounter a name so remarkable in character — I should have done what decency and imagination both demand. I should have first acknowledged the quiet ingenuity that such a name implies, for originality is a flower all too rare in the grey gardens of commerce. Thereafter, I should have probed — not with idle curiosity but with the proper reverence due to any act of human creation — into the story behind it: what vision or sentiment had midwifed its birth, what bond of friendship or shared endeavour had shaped its form.

And once the veil had been lifted and the answer laid bare, the only appropriate response — the only one, indeed, that would have satisfied both heart and intellect — would have been admiration for the friendship and affection so evident in so deliberate a choice. Surely such a conclusion would have been more fitting than the vulgar little jest about sexuality which the gentleman, with all the tact of a child prodding a caged animal, had thought sufficient.

The whole encounter, steeped as it was in a species of pettiness that ought to have embarrassed even the most infantile of minds, roused in me a greater contemplation. It compelled me to set pen to paper and chart, as best I could, the many noble notions that seem to have drifted entirely out of fancy in this frothy, featherweight culture of ours — a civilisation so intoxicated with appearances that it can no longer distinguish the shallow from the deep, the crude from the kind, nor the trivial from the true.

Example 1

The Unremarkable Friendship of Mervin and Lawrence — and the World’s Remarkable Misreading

Mervin and Lawrence had been companions of the truest sort — a friendship forged in that golden age of boyhood, tempered by the trials of common classrooms, burnished on the football field, and matured into a bond so staunch that to describe them as “inseparable” would hardly suffice. They were, as it were, two strands of the same cord, distinct in fibre but woven into one enduring thread.

It was after one such day of strenuous exertion upon the field — the kind of afternoon that leaves a man feeling as though he has loaned every ounce of his strength to the soil beneath his feet — that Mervin sought the comfort of a Jacuzzi, the modern-day man’s poor substitute for the soothing embrace of the sea. Lawrence, in contrast, had yielded to his fatigue rather more suddenly and collapsed into slumber, still clad in his muddied battle-garb, on the couch in Mervin’s room.

At some quiet interlude, stirred perhaps by the unfamiliar hush of the room, Lawrence’s eyes opened just as Mervin, now fresh from his ablutions, stood at his wardrobe, surveying the garments within. His back was turned — bare and unguarded — the sort of unremarkable moment that passes, in most lives, without even the faintest echo. Yet Lawrence, possessed of that unstudied frankness that only true friends may afford one another, let out a teasing remark, half-laughing through his lingering drowsiness: “Dude, I am surprised that you have such a puny butt in comparison to the rest of your toned body.”

When Mervin later recounted this tale to us, over the lazy comfort of wine and the kind of laughter that only old friends know — the unhurried, unpoliced laughter of those who have nothing to prove and nothing to fear — the jest was received in the spirit of light-heartedness with which it had been born. It made no mark upon our esteem for either of them, nor did it so much as ruffle the gentle surface of that evening’s conversation. The remark dissolved, as all harmless jests do, into the larger sea of symbiotic stories. Or so it seemed.

For there was, as there always seems to be, one exception. One friend — whose understanding of the world, I dare say, was shaped more by speculation than by experience — believed, with the slyness of a serpent coiled behind the fig leaves of false concern, into the ear of another. 

Mervin and Lawrence must be gay.

It is an unfortunate hallmark of our times, that such austerity of companionship should be twisted and tethered by the small, stunted imaginations of those who, having little of substance within themselves, must look upon genuine closeness with envy, and reframe it in terms that their own narrow minds can endure.

I know of friends — honest, unpretentious men — who have traded jests, light as feathers, about the more delicate parts of each other’s anatomy. I know, too, of women, no less sensible or secure, who have shared confidences and observations upon their bosoms, as comfortably and unselfconsciously as one might remark upon the cut of a dress or the length of a hem. And not once, in any such exchange, did the shadow of lasciviousness fall upon the moment. These were, and remain, the harmless musings of human creatures perfectly at ease with one another.

The Foregone Reflex: A Glimpse into Human Nature

There is, moreover, a primeval and immutable truth at the heart of this — a truth that present-day man, in all his charade of sophistication, would do well to recall. When a man, by some happenstance or accident, finds his eyes momentarily cast upon the member of another, it is neither perversion nor perversity that bids him pause, but a reflex older than language, older even than civilisation. A fleeting instinct, born of that primal arithmetic by which nature herself once measured a man’s fitness to survive.

In the long shadows of our prehistory, it was the strongest, the most virile, the most physically assured of men who were celebrated, and whose seed was sown most widely, so that the tribe might grow stronger by his blood. The glance, quick and involuntary, was once a silent affliction — a vestige of the age-old contest for survival, not a token of desire. And though the world has changed, the primordial machinery remains, buried beneath the polished surface of modern manners.

Why then, I ask, do we persist in this tedious travesty of puritanical pretence? Why cloak so natural a reflex in the sackcloth of guilt and undertone as though we had stumbled upon some grievous sin, when in actuality we have only glimpsed, for the briefest flicker of time, the common construction of our characteristic humanity?

The world, it seems, would rather blush at the body than comprehend it — and in so doing, reveals far more about its own uneasiness than about the bodies in question.

Example 2

Delhi’s Ease vs. Bangalore’s Suspicion — A Tale of Two Cultures

Not long ago, a friend of mine — recently uprooted from the brisk and bustling avenues of Delhi to the softer, slower lanes of Bangalore — unburdened his frustrations to me over the course of an evening meal, the kind of unceremonious supper where conversation flows as freely as the drink.

“Bro,” he began, with the earnestness of a man disclosing some tragic philosophical absurdity rather than a mere societal irritation, “in Delhi we’ve a rather healthy culture when it comes to these things. No one bats an eye if you saunter about your own home in nothing but your briefs, nor if you greet your mates with an unstudied embrace — as one ought to, untroubled by the world’s prying gaze.” Here he paused, and a grimace passed across his face — not the sort that pain brings, but the far deeper ache of cultural disillusionment. 

“Besides,” he continued, the words growing heavier with personal history, “I’ve lived in hostels since my schoolboy days. When you’ve grown up among the brotherhood of bare mattresses and communal bathrooms, the sight of a bare backside is hardly cause for ceremony. But here — here in the South — the culture is, well, stilted. Any trace of closeness between male friends, any display of genuine ease, draws these narrow little frowns and raised brows, as if you had broken some unspoken covenant with decency itself. It’s so bloody messed up, man!”

I could not but feel an abysmal and unflustered empathy with him, for his lament struck against a reality I myself had long observed: that there exists, undeniably, in these parts a strain of general idiocy so astonishingly consistent it has almost the solemnity of tradition. Here, the art of minding one’s own business has not merely been neglected — it has, so far as I can tell, never been introduced into the curriculum of daily life at all.

The most trifling gestures of human comradeship, especially among men, seem to ignite in the minds of these self-appointed custodians of propriety the wildest and most vulgar conjectures, as though brotherly ease must, by some unsaid rule, conceal a secret perversion. The truly perplexing thing is not the existence of these idle tongues — for every age has bred its share of weasels and whisperers — but the sheer persistence with which they mistake the language of friendship for the grammar of sexuality.

Misreading Brotherhood: A Moral Illiteracy

It is, of course, a most elementary misunderstanding — one might even call it a kind of moral illiteracy — to imagine that where there is affection there must also be appetite. These people, poor creatures, are entirely blind to the fact that what they witness in such harmless moments is not the outworking of some furtive desire, but the natural and unpolluted ease of brotherhood — that primitive and upright fellowship of equals which asks for nothing but sincerity, and offers in return that rarest of all comforts: the knowledge that one is known, and yet not judged.

And so the weasels carry on, scurrying from corner to corner, finding scandal where only simplicity was meant to dwell, and seeing shadows where there is only light.

Example 3

Checks and Balances — A Brotherhood Beyond Biology

My business partner and I are, in the eyes of the world, much like Siamese twins — though no surgeon’s blade, nor the cold arithmetic of biology, binds us. We are, rather, living proof against the quaint delusion that blood alone determines the strength of kinship; a delusion so tenacious that many will believe no two souls can share the sacred togetherness of brothers unless they first shared the same cradle.

Years ago, a mutual friend — one whose wit, on rare occasion, wandered into the dominion of wisdom — remarked with admirable precision that we were like checks and balances: two halves of a single, working whole, each guarding the other’s limits, each securing the other’s freedom. I have long thought that observation the most fitting description of the bond we possess.

And for all this, I must make plain — if only for the benefit of those whose imaginations lean toward the gutter more readily than toward reason — that this friendship is, and always has been, untouched by the slightest trace of sexual interest. It is not so much a matter of self-restraint as it is a simple fact of nature: such penchants are not part of the engineering of this particular bond, for the very obvious reason that our inclinations lie elsewhere.

Indeed, we have each enjoyed, in the unadvertised privacy of our lives, more than our fair share of women, and the unruly pleasures that often accompany the company of the fairer sex. But neither of us is in the habit of parading our affairs upon the village notice board. We do not make public announcements of our conquests, nor issue bulletins to satisfy the nosiness of indolent minds.

And so, in the absence of such performative declarations, the dense and restless minds of lesser men — those always eager to fill the silence of another’s life with the noise of their own invention — will busy themselves with the oldest and most tedious of pastimes: babbling behind backs, weaving the small, brittle fictions that seem to give such people their only true sense of importance.

Example 4

M and V — Companionship vs. the World’s Fixation with Romance

At our members-only-club, amid the usual drift of characters that populate such haunts, there exist two friends — M and V — whose companionship has grown into the kind of quiet legend that often provokes more surmising than admiration among those whose own lives, alas, offer little material for either.

M is a married man, a creature tethered to hearth and home by the solemn vows of matrimony, while V, by contrast, remains unwed, unattached, and entirely untroubled by the endemic anxieties that this station seems to provoke in the minds of lesser mortals. The two are, by all outward signs, inseparable. When M is not dutifully by the side of his wife, he is found in the company of V; and when V is not with M, his time is spent either bent to the demands of his profession or engaged in that patrician and time-honoured pastime: cricket.

It is inevitable — and depressingly predictable — that in a world so obsessed on the commerce of romantic entanglement, V’s bachelorhood has become a matter of urban investigation. The question, posed more often than politely warranted, is always the same, though dressed in different, often clumsy words: Why, if he is as clever and eligible as he appears, does he not have a woman dangling from his arm?

V, for his part, answers this crude curiosity with the consistency of a man who has long grown weary of the question. His reply, always delivered with a composure that borders on the philosophical, is that he has no hunger for the shallow sport of casual flings, and that the carnival of ornamental ‘arm candy’ — so often mistaken for romance by the contemporary world — holds no charm for him.

But of course, such honest straightforwardness is seldom satisfactory for a populace that has grown more concerned with projecting its own fixations upon others than minding the course of its own small and scattered lives. The mere fact that a man might choose companionship over conquest, or friendship over flirtation, seems to strike these folk as a species of heresy against the unspoken dogmas of their day — dogmas which, one suspects, they obey more out of fear than conviction.

V, however, is no stranger to such bigots, and, with the untroubled coolness that marks the truly free man, he often meets their prying intrusions with a reply as dry as it is disarming. When the cross-questioning grows more persistent than politeness would allow, he will quip — in a tone so light that it might almost pass for cordiality — that if they are so consumed by meddlesomeness, they are most welcome to join him for a threesome. 

One can hardly imagine a more fitting riposte, nor one more capable of exposing the pettifoggery of minds so eager to sift the private dust of another’s life.

Example 5

The Brothers S and B — A Study in Fraternal Love Misunderstood

There are two brothers, S and B, whose attachment to one another is so constant and so unshakeable that one might, with little exaggeration, describe them as firmly glued — not by the adhesive of mere habit, but by that rarer bond of genuine fraternal affection which neither time nor circumstance seems able to erode.

And yet — as human nature rarely fails to stoop to its lowest common denominator — it was not long before I heard, floating through the slothful air of club-room cackle and back-alley chatter, the most ludicrous and distasteful of suggestions: that S and B were, of all things, entangled in an incestuous relationship. The word itself wafted about like the sour scent of something long decayed, and those who gave it breath seemed almost to revel in the vulgarity of the thought.

It is at moments like these that one begins to suspect the human mind, left untrained by reason and untempered by charity, is capable of descending into an abyss from which no ladder of redemption could possibly reach. Such imaginations are not merely misled — they are, I fear, unwell. There is in this sort of talk the unmistakable scent of an illness — not of the body, but of the mind — a sickness of perception so severe that one can hardly set a boundary upon the extent of its lunacy.

For there are follies born of ignorance, and there are follies born of malice — but this, I think, springs from a still lower place: the barren soil of a heart so starved of decency and intellectual effort that it feeds itself on the refuse of its own distrusts.

On Comfortable Masculinity and the Absurdities of Suspicion

There are certain things I have long wished to say — and would say, if only the blockheaded multitude could be trusted to listen without falling into their customary sneers and assumed idiocies. But since silence often leaves error to multiply unchecked, I shall attempt to say it plainly, for once.

Let it be known: a heterosexual man, secure in the quiet fortifications of his own nature, does not shy from the company of men whose orientation differs from his own. In fact, the openly self-possessed man — the one whose identity is anchored rather than adrift — feels no tremor of anxiety in so simple a circumstance as accompanying a bisexual friend to a gay bar, or offering his time and presence in solidarity with those whose lives chart a different course. To imagine otherwise is to mistake the world for a schoolyard and the adult mind for the playbook of a child.

The Sameer Test: Healthy Minds Think Healthily

Curious to test this theory, I once put the question — a thought experiment, if you like — to Sameer, a friend of mine whose acquaintance I have been privileged to enjoy for over two decades. I asked whether, in the fertile wilds of universal imagination, he thought the closeness I share with my business partner, or the steadfast bond between the brothers S and B, could ever be misconstrued as evidence of something more salacious. Sameer, scarcely believing the question required serious answer, looked at me with the honest bewilderment of a healthy mind.

“Are you serious someone even thought so about all of you, bro?” he asked, with a half-laugh that belied both pity and scorn for the blabbermouths. “Man, I’ve always envied you guys. The way you’re all so closely knit. Somewhere deep down, I’ve always wanted that kind of connection with my own brothers, or with some of my old friends.”

And at that moment, the gospel — which I had always suspected — rang with renewed clarity: healthy minds produce healthy thoughts. Those who trade in scandal, who assign wickedness where only affection exists, reveal more about their own barren interior lives than about the people they calumny over. And to any who would suggest I only value Sameer’s opinion because it flatters me, I say this: the judgment of a wholesome mind will always outweigh the mutterings of those whose hearts are darkened by supposition. Such creatures — with their cramped imaginations and perverse fixations — are best left to deteriorate in the company of their own kind.

Being ‘With’ Men vs. Being ‘Into’ Men: A Clarification for the Narrow-Minded

It is startling, really, how many fail to grasp the humblest distinction: to be “with” men is entirely different from being “into” men. One may seek the company of brothers, friends, comrades-in-arms, without the faintest hint of erotic motive. The planet, however, in its lethargy, continues to flatten this distinction, as though human intimacy were a one-note song, incapable of expressing anything beyond the sexual. The legitimacy is both elementary and uncorrupted: if you wish to surround yourself with men, do so. If you wish to be a man’s man — not in the slangy, shallow sense, but in the olden spirit of brotherhood — then by all means, be one. The world will chatter, of course, for it has always chattered. But so long as you are clear-eyed about who you are, let the world amuse itself with its guesses. Such inquisitiveness is less a sign of interest than of an empty, farcical mind.

What Will People Say? Why It Should Not Matter

And so, to any man who finds himself pressed under the dead weight of the question — “What will people say?” — I offer the only counsel worth giving: Do not trouble yourself about the opinion of inconsequential busybodies. Their words, like dry leaves on an autumn path, are noisy but weightless. Unless you feel, in your own quiet heart, some question worth answering about yourself, pay them no heed at all.

Society: The Great Engineer of Stigma

Much of the stigma that clings, like mildew, to the broad and varied spectrum of human sexuality would dissolve altogether if people’s prying eyes were blind to it. Judgement, after all, is not born in solitude but in the shadowed corners of national consensus — that invisible court where the uninformed pass verdict on the innocent. Were it possible to silence the superficial, or to cultivate in them some fragment of reflective wisdom, these burdens would lift from many a shoulder.

Love Beyond Understanding: Brotherhood Needs No Apology

It is worth remembering, too — and worth repeating until the lesson sinks in — that two people of the same gender can love one another with all the depth and devotion of siblings, without a trace of anything the unrefined imagination so eagerly conjures. Human affection wears many faces, and the world is poorer for each one we mistrust out of ignorance. Just because a feeling lies beyond the circumference of another’s understanding does not license retribution or incredulity. And if you should ever find yourself confronted by those who cannot fathom this — the immature, the uncomprehending, the homophobic — you would do well to consign them to the category of aliens. They are, after all, strangers to both reason and love.

The Marital Myth: “Past the Age of Marriage? Must Be Gay!”

One of the most galling, and persistently misused, notions floating in the civilian ether is this: “Oh, he has passed the age of marriage. He must be gay.” Or, “They seemed such a happy couple. This talk of ‘incompatibility’ must be a smokescreen; surely he has fallen for a man, or she for a woman.” One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep at the poverty of imagination that produces such conclusions.

There are, in fact, countless reasons why men and women choose not to marry. Some hunger for freedom, some for space, and some simply prefer their own company over the dim compromise of an ill-suited companion. And while I wish, with all the sincerity of my heart, that the age of forced marriages — pressed upon the young by parental iron fists — were behind us, the picture is less comforting. Such coercion, alas, still flourishes. And worse yet, we lose many a bright and promising soul to these very social tyrannies, their lives reduced to quiet resignation under the encumbrance of other people’s expectations.

Freedom from Blether: Learning the Art of Not Caring

But those who have matured past the juvenile need for local approval — those fortunate few who have learned the art of not caring — walk freely through these snares, impervious to the jeers and utters. Others, less fortified, may still feel the sting of damnation. To them I offer this reminder: just as you had the courage to choose the life that suited you best, so too must you train your heart to discount the purposeless hubbub of the officious.

Humanity has always thrived on rumour. Trifling tongues require no proof, only the whiff of novelty — and what muckrake reveals, more often than not, is not the clandestine life of its target but the dark, unexamined corners of the speaker’s own mind.

Bosom Buddies and the Beauty of Living Unapologetically

And so, I say — live as you wish to live. Love whom you wish to love. Give not the faintest consideration to the snarls and squawks of the world’s tittle-tattle. Intimacy is the province of two souls alone — whether mental or physical — and beyond that boundary, no other opinion need ever enter. Perhaps this is why the term bosom buddies was coined in the first place: to dignify with language that great, unsentimental brotherhood of mutual loyalty and affection that neither needs nor asks for popular endorsement.

So I say: go forth. Find your bosom buddy, and live your life upon the terms you yourself have chosen. The world’s view is a wind — and you, sir, are a ship. Let the wind blow as it pleases.