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.

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.

How strange and wondrous it is — that a phenomenon once held as the direst spectre haunting the chambers of political thought, should, with the passage of centuries, be reimagined not as a peril, but as a panacea for the world’s social afflictions.

From the contemplative heights of Plato’s Academy to the sober warnings of John Adams, wise men have long viewed revolution as a calamity — the very unravelling of the delicate fabric that binds a civilised society. For such men, the highest political artistry lay in forging constitutions of balance and moderation, instruments designed to temper the passions of mankind and guard against the tumults that revolutions unleash.

Yet in The Revolution to Come, Dan Edelstein leads us on a sweeping journey through the ages — from the sunlit agora of Greek antiquity to the storm-laden skies of Leninist Russia — tracing the curious transformation of this idea. The ancients, as Edelstein reminds us, saw history as a wild and wayward river, meandering without compass or destination, where revolutions signalled not hope, but disorder. This view held sway for centuries, until the Enlightenment dawned and cast its rational light upon the human story, reshaping the imagination of thinkers to see history not as a haphazard unfolding, but as a grand ascent toward progress — and revolution, once the enemy of order, as its very engine.

Put to trial amidst the fires of the French Revolution and canonised in the struggles of the modern age, this vision of revolution would offer nations a siren’s song of justice and renewal. And yet, as Edelstein so eloquently argues, the arrival of any revolution leaves societies not only changed, but often fractured and estranged, birthing new conflicts and hatreds beneath the banners of progress — as the faithful hunt the so-called counterrevolutionary with a zeal that seldom distinguishes between friend and foe.

This is no ordinary volume, but a panoramic meditation upon one of mankind’s oldest dilemmas: whether to prize stability over the allure of transformation, or to wager the peace of the present for the uncertain promises of tomorrow. In our own age — an age not unlike those shadowed by fear and upheaval — Edelstein’s work asks us, as all true philosophy must, to weigh the costs of the world we long for against the world we stand to lose.

WHEN THE HEART KNOWS BETTER 

~ 

An ESSAY on DESIRE and DIGNITY

EXAMPLE 1 

THE FEARLESS FLIRT AT THE FARMHOUSE

It was at a friend’s country house, a place of some rustic charm and much generous hospitality, that I found myself standing by the bar, engaged in the simple and civil task of pouring myself a glass of whiskey. No sooner had I done so than a young lady, with the lightness of one accustomed to both attention and the art of acquiring it, made her approach.

Her manner was as unguarded as it was bold; indeed, before I could so much as enquire her name, she presented me with a proposition—one of mutual indulgence, free of ceremony and, it seemed, expectation of refusal.

I confess I was rather taken aback—not by the novelty of the suggestion (for the world is ever abundant in such offers) but by the candour with which it was delivered. Exercising, I hope, both courtesy and kindness, I declined her invitation as politely as words would allow, and wished her a pleasant continuation of the evening, trusting that the festivities would furnish her with merrier company.

I had not taken more than a few steps when her voice, quick and inquisitive, reached me once more. She wished to know, rather pointedly, whether it was she, in particular, who had failed to meet with my approval. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have dismissed so trifling an enquiry without reply. Yet, given the setting—my friend’s house, her status as a guest, and the natural demands of good breeding—I turned back to face her and assured her, quite truthfully, that the matter was not one of her person at all.

“Is it you, then?” she asked, pausing to raise her glass, the question hanging lightly between us, neither fully spoken nor entirely concealed.

“I am afraid it is precisely that,” I replied with a nod, “it is about me.”

“Are you?” she enquired further, the meaning of her words cloaked in suggestion, though plain enough to the understanding.

Once more, I extended to her my sincere wishes for an enjoyable evening, and, without further ceremony, I took my leave.

EXAMPLE 2 

THE DIGITAL DELUSIONS OF MODERN COURTSHIP

A writer of my acquaintance, a man of both curiosity and craft, had come to visit from Bombay. He was, at the time, gathering material for a script — a study, so he claimed, of the temper and habits of modern youth. As part of his research, he had taken the rather unconventional but enterprising step of enlisting himself upon one of those now-fashionable digital marketplaces for romantic acquaintance, which I believe are commonly known as “dating sites.”

It was not long before the enterprise bore fruit, though perhaps not of the sort he had anticipated. The very first message he received was stripped of all preamble or pretence, and read — I quote him verbatim — “Hi, my parents not home for the night. Come, we’ll fuck.”

My friend, whose nature leans more toward the wry than the censorious, replied with as much composure as the situation allowed and enquired, not unreasonably, as to the young lady’s age. The answer arrived with the same disarming swiftness as the invitation: “I am 16, though I pose as 18.”

On another occasion, he was approached — or rather, electronically accosted — by a lady who, after showering him with the sort of extravagant praise modern self-advertisers often lavish upon strangers, proposed a meeting. When he suggested, with the quaintness of an older world, that perhaps they might first become better acquainted through conversation, she replied that she already knew him far better than he likely knew himself.

“My dear woman,” he wrote back, “and did you gather all this from the four lines of description I had so scantily provided?”

Her reply was as swift as it was self-assured: “Absolutely — just as you went weak in the knees for me, having seen nothing more than my sexy pictures.”

My friend recounted these episodes with great amusement, though beneath his laughter lay no small measure of sober reflection on the strange brand of narcissism and illusion that seems to have become the climate in which so many of the younger generation are now content to breathe.

Out of sheer mischief — and perhaps, I suspect, from the same scholarly curiosity that drives a naturalist to inspect the more exotic species — he resolved to meet this particular lady over coffee. The meeting was uneventful until, the coffee scarcely finished, she rather abruptly proposed they adjourn to her residence for what she plainly called “some fun.”

“But I had thought you professed not to be ‘that sort,’” he reminded her.

She giggled, rather like a schoolgirl who believes herself to have outwitted the master, and replied with devastating frankness: “You think we come online for conversation? Or to drink coffee with men? We join those sites only for sex.”

To underscore her point, she proceeded to make an unmistakable hand gesture — one which, though I shall not describe it here, left little doubt as to the nature of her proposition.

When my friend, exercising his usual self-command, politely declined, she cast one final dart: “You never mentioned on your profile that you were gay.”

At this, the absurdity of the entire encounter so overcame him that he burst into laughter — not the discreet, private chuckle of a man humoured by life’s oddities, but the deep, uncontainable kind that startled several nearby diners from their own conversations and left him, for a moment, the unwitting centrepiece of the room.

EXAMPLE 3

A PUBLIC DEBATE ON FIDELITY

Not long ago, while seated alone at a modest café, I found myself an unwilling audience to a conversation at the table beside mine — a conversation carried on with such volume and abandon that even the most disciplined ear could scarcely have avoided it. There sat two women and a man, their voices rising and falling with the unrestrained ease of those who mistake proximity for privacy.

The subject of their debate was, in essence, the age-old question of fidelity, though one suspects the term would have struck them as archaic, if not entirely foreign. One of the women, adopting the role of both tempter and philosopher, was endeavouring to persuade the young man that the marital vow need not stand in the way of what she coyly called “an affair.”

The man, for his part, appeared not wholly convinced — a refreshing, if fleeting, display of conscience. Time and again he offered the same quiet, almost plaintive protest: that he was, after all, married, and that such conduct would constitute a betrayal of his wife. But the woman, having armed herself with what passes in some circles for modern wisdom, countered with the assertion that human nature itself rendered such fidelity an unreasonable expectation, that no man was truly fashioned for monogamy, and that, in essence, the moral law ought to make accommodations for biology.

I could not help but notice — for their table was but a few feet from mine — that the man, though he listened, did little more than shake his head in quiet, persistent dissent.

Growing impatient with his obstinacy, the woman pressed the point with a bluntness that left little room for misinterpretation: “What is your problem, dear fellow? So long as you share your bed with your wife at night, and mine during the day, who need ever be the wiser, unless you choose to open your mouth?”

At this, the second woman — who until now had preserved a silence that might almost have suggested disapproval — chose at last to lend her voice to the chorus, adding with an air of worldly weariness: “She’s right, you know. Think of the variety. How long do you imagine you’ll remain content with the same woman? Sooner or later, the monotony will gnaw at you.”

The words, though crudely expressed, were not unfamiliar to me — the very same old argument, wrapped in the modern vocabulary of appetite and novelty, as though the pursuit of pleasure had ever been anything but monotonous in itself. I sat there, pondering not the brazenness of their talk (which the age, I fear, has taught us to expect) but the strange mixture of cynicism and credulity that could so easily persuade otherwise intelligent creatures to trade loyalty for mere distraction.

THE CRISIS OF CONTEMPORARY VALUES

These three episodes, modest though they may seem, serve as no more than the faintest reflection of the temper of our present-day society. It is difficult — perhaps even unwise — to pass a swift judgment upon such matters as being categorically right or wrong, for the age has grown so artful in blurring the lines between the two. Yet this much, at least, is certain: sex is not — and was never intended to be — the idle amusement or casual pastime it is so industriously advertised to be. It involves, invariably and inescapably, the entanglement of emotions and the engagement of human souls, not merely the mechanical coupling of bodies.

It is a singular marvel — or perhaps, more accurately, a singular tragedy — how every other printed page and every glowing screen now seems to busy itself with the overt dissection of sex: instructions on the “how,” speculations on the “what,” and an endless stream of opinions on the “why” and “with whom.” The imagery accompanying these lessons is so astoundingly explicit that it has, in a manner of speaking, burglarised the mystery that once graced the slow unfolding of courtship — the tender prelude before bodies intertwined not merely to gratify appetite, but to weave memories.

OF LABELS, IDENTITIES, AND THE BARKING OF DOGS

The word gay, too, has suffered a fate most curious. It has been stretched and strained, overused and over-applied, until it seems now to stand for everything and, thereby, nothing at all. Should a man or woman happen to be unmarried, the world wastes no time in concluding they must be homosexual. Should one, by some rare and commendable exercise of patience, refrain from flinging themselves into romantic entanglement for any notable length of time, society is quick to label them confused. If a marriage dissolves — and heaven knows how frequently that occurs in our age — the collective wisdom of the masses declares, with almost tiresome predictability, that one or the other party must have awoken one morning under the revelation that they were, in fact, gay, bisexual or fluid.

And if, by some old-fashioned stroke of integrity or self-respect, a man or woman declines the modern expectation of physical intimacy upon the very first meeting, the world, lacking any finer explanation, is content to stamp the label gay upon them — as though to abstain were itself an unnatural perversion.

In truth, the term has become little more than a hollow jest, a sort of social punctuation for conversations empty of understanding but full of noise. My advice, for what little it is worth, is that if you find yourself among those whom this idle speculation seeks to wound, you would do well to treat it as one treats the barking of village dogs at passing motorcars: the dogs may raise an awful racket, and expend their breath upon furious declarations, but the car — and indeed its passengers — remain untroubled, unmoved, and altogether indifferent to both the barking and the barkers.

THE TWISTING OF FEMINISM

Modern men, it would seem, are finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to the rather brazen forthrightness of the women of our age. The very same women who once lifted their voices against the injustices and oppressions imposed upon them by the male-dominated world, now appear — under the venerable and oft-abused banner of feminism — to have sworn themselves to unsettle the equilibrium of men’s lives. Much like the term homo, the word feminism has suffered from the modern malady of overuse and careless misapplication.

It was not, originally, a battle cry for domestic supremacy nor a license to parade one’s strength in the household; rather, it was a virtuous attempt to secure equality for women, particularly in spheres of work and social opportunity, where their merit had long been overlooked. A woman of sound mind and true independence scarcely requires the shelter of any such label to validate her worth. She knows her own mind, she walks her own path, and she wins her place in the world by her own talent. Yet, as is so often the case, common sense — a faculty tragically uncommon — has proven unequal to the task, and many have trampled upon the beauty of this once gallant idea, distorting its intention for personal grievance and gain.

Nature and evolution have, with quiet wisdom, assigned to us roles — both mental and anatomical — that fit our design, and whenever this ancient balance is tampered with, the world stirs in confusion and unrest, as we have seen with growing clarity over recent decades. Whether there is a remedy to such disquiet is uncertain, but I am reminded of my friend Mervyn, whose words, however inelegant, held the simple force of truth: “You know who you are, and what you are, so why the devil do you care about what anyone else thinks, dude?”

A CONFESSION OVER WINE

Not long ago, I found myself in conversation over a quiet drink with a friend — a lady long married, or so I had presumed, and a mother to two sons pursuing their studies in America. Though we had known each other for more than two decades, the occasion for personal confidences had never before arisen between us. It was quite out of the blue, then, that she turned to me with a measured caution and asked whether I did not miss the comforts of matrimony. I replied, quite truthfully, that I did not. Her next query, I suspected, was borne not of idle curiosity, but of some quiet personal wondering: why, after all these years, had I never married?

I answered her candidly: as I had never felt the tug toward procreation, I had thought it unwise in my youth to enter into marriage for its own sake. She listened with the faintest smile playing about her lips as her slender fingers encircled her glass of wine. Then, after a pause, she asked me whether, at any point in my life, I had ever been confused about my sexuality. There was in her voice a note of vulnerability — an almost unspoken self-doubt — and sensing it, I met her question not with evasion but with levity, asking if what she truly meant was whether I had ever watched gay pornography. She grinned and nodded in silent admission.

I told her that I saw no contradiction in being able to watch two women without protest and, by the same measure, feeling no particular distress if the same scene were played out between two men. “Really?” she asked, surprised. I explained that human sexuality, like so much else in life, rarely conforms to the fixed boundaries we like to assign it. The anxieties that plague us often do not arise from the thing itself, but from the imagined judgments of those around us. 

THE PROBLEM OF NORMAL AND ABNORMAL

“Say I wanted to sleep with an animal,” she ventured suddenly, “would you, as a friend, object to it?”

“Who are you or I to object to what another person desires?” I replied. “Society would think it abnormal, wouldn’t it?” she pressed, revealing — with this single admission — that the true confession had been waiting just behind these questions.

I asked her, “Do you think so?” and for the first time, I saw an openness in her gaze that had not been there before. She shrugged her shoulders, unsure. I asked her once more, “What is abnormal?”

She hesitated, searching for words. “You know how people think you are strange if you enjoy things that aren’t considered normal,” she said at last. I told her that I had little interest in judging what was or wasn’t normal. As for myself, I added, I neither sought out such content nor was repulsed by it if it happened to pass before me. “So, being a heterosexual man, if I can make peace with the mere sight of it, why should it trouble you?”

She fell silent, deep in thought. 

THE WEIGHT OF GUILT AND THE FREEDOM OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE

At last she admitted, almost as if she were unburdening a great weight, that on two occasions she had shared an intimate experience with another woman, and had enjoyed it — though the guilt of it had been gnawing at her ever since. I listened without interruption. After a pause, she asked whether I judged her for her confession. I shook my head.

“Why?” she asked.

I replied that while I was neither a psychologist nor a philosopher, I knew enough to understand that her guilt served no higher purpose. Why should it matter what I — or anyone else — thought? “We live in society,” she countered, “and we must think of that society. I have two teenage sons — what if they were to find out?”

I told her gently that her heart would lead her better than any external voice, and that her sons, by now, were surely old enough to understand. She gave a dry laugh. “You speak so freely,” she said, “because you are used to seeing women do such things on screen. But what about you men?”

I smiled at her candour. “What about us?” I asked.

“I wish men,” she continued, “could accept the fact that if they simply lent each other a helping hand, it would spare so many women from the burden of unwanted pregnancies and other complications. But men are so shackled to their notions of manliness, they miss out on the beauty of sharing something with another who shares their own anatomy.”

I could not help but admire her honesty. Then came the question I had, perhaps, been expecting all along: “Have you ever tried it?” she asked, stammering slightly.

I told her I had never known such a drought of women to warrant the experiment, but that if one day I were to feel hopelessly drawn to a man, I would follow that feeling without fear. “Wouldn’t you be afraid of the world’s judgment?” she asked.

I answered that she, too, had not been afraid when she gave in to her own feelings, despite any afterthoughts. She nodded. “Exactly,” I said, “and though I have never experienced such an inclination, and do not expect to, if ever the day came when I did, I should meet it as one meets all new experiences — without alarm, for it is only through the testing of boundaries that we truly come to know ourselves.”

She regarded me for a long moment, her expression hovering between surprise and contemplation. “I think I know myself,” she said at last, with a sudden show of confidence.

“Only the shallow know themselves,” I quoted Wilde, which made her blush and fall into a brief, thoughtful silence.

“This isn’t about me,” I said softly, resting my hand on hers to ease her confusion, “desiring a moment of softness when one is weary of the hard is no betrayal of one’s nature. You knew what you wanted, and you acted upon it. Be proud.”

Her eyes searched mine. “Yes,” I said, answering her unspoken thought, “the rest is just noise. Let it go.”

ON LOVE, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, AND MISUNDERSTOOD AFFECTIONS

The conversation then drifted to cinema. “What did you make of Brokeback Mountain?” she asked, as if trying to link her private concerns to something more universal. “The people I knew watched it in hushed secrecy.”

I laughed. “My dear, from where to where have you leapt! But since you ask: I thought it one of the rare films that treated the subject with dignity. Most people, on hearing the words homosexual or bisexual, think only of sex, spelled out in great neon letters. But orientation is not about sex alone. Brokeback Mountain was, to my mind, a story of love — and love, as I have always believed, is neither confined by gender nor limited by convention.”

She grew quiet, as if allowing the thought to settle.

“If one looks beyond the surface,” I added, “that film had more to teach us about the heart than many of the so-called moral authorities of our time.”

She gave a quick laugh. “You creative ones are quite the peculiar breed.”

“That we are,” I replied, setting down my glass.

She thanked me with warmth and ordered another glass of wine, and the conversation turned once more.

ON MARRIAGE, COMPANIONSHIP, AND KNOWING ONESELF

“Have you ever felt that you had any other problems — emotional or mental?” she asked.

I told her truthfully that I had never been burdened by such wounds, much as others might like to believe otherwise.

“Then why do you seem so cold and distant?”

I smiled. “I am cold and distant only until I know someone. Beyond that, I am anything but.”

“Wouldn’t that put people off?” she asked.

“Perhaps. But I’ve been fortunate to know the finest people I could have hoped for, so I suppose this temperament keeps the unworthy at bay.”

She nodded with understanding. “But we are older now, more certain, more fossilised. What if you never meet the right fit? Would you regret not marrying?”

I replied that marriage had never been so central to my life that its absence would cause my world to collapse. Even in youth, I had contentedly charted my own course. True, finding the right companion grows more difficult with age, but I was never rigid, only discerning. If ever I were to meet someone who was genuine — equally at ease in a ballroom as on a roadside, sipping tea — age would not be a barrier. And if I did not, I would feel no sorrow for the lack.

“So you don’t believe in permanence?”

“Does permanence even exist?” I asked.

She laughed and gave my arm a playful slap. I concluded, “I would rather remain happily alone than unhappily accompanied. And I dare say, that ought to be the rule for anyone.”

THE TYRANNY OF FAMILY PRESSURE

I have a friend — as dear to me as any brother born of the same mother. Our friendship ran so deep that, in the frolicsome spirit of jest, I would sometimes quip: if only one of us were to alter the unfortunate circumstance of our sexes, the tiresome waltz of finding the right woman would be solved in an instant. We could marry one another and spare the world — and ourselves — the whole weary business. He would laugh, as heartily as he always did, and in that same zestful vein, would reply that, were the transformation complete and the elusive female hormones to strip us of our mutual fondness, it would all end in calamity rather than bliss.

For many years, this friend of mine lived abroad. A migratory bird, he would return home with faithful regularity at Christmas — until last year, when he descended upon us not merely as a visitor but as a man freshly wedded. His announcement left our circle of friends as speechless as a congregation who has heard a most unexpected sermon.

“Is it the same young lady you were once so uncertain about?” I asked him, puzzled by the suddenness of it all.

“Yes,” he answered, with a disarming innocence, almost as though he’d forgotten the doubts he had once confided to us.

Time, it seems, is the great architect of human change, and we — knowing him as well as we did — resisted the temptation to draw hasty conclusions. Yet, I confess, curiosity bedevilled at me. A month after his nuptials, we met again.

“What on earth happened?” I asked, unvarnished and direct, for ours was not the kind of friendship that required the frills of formal civility.

His reply was unembellished, almost devoid of life. “You know how long my parents have been chasing me,” he said, “one night, a week before Christmas, my mother woke me at the ghastly hour of three. She said my father’s health was failing him, and the remedy, she believed, lay in my agreeing to marry the girl they had chosen.”

I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and held my tongue, but he noticed the gesture and scolded me for it. Our silence hung heavy and charged. At length, he added, “I told them I would consent, but only on the condition that if the marriage proved ill-fitted, I would not be held accountable for the consequences.”

Still, my vexation would not be pacified. “She is not someone I can hate,” he confessed, “but neither am I drawn to her. The very act that consummates a marriage eludes me, not out of will, but from the absence of desire.”

This, from a man I had always regarded as the freest of souls — one who would vanish at will, turning off his devices like one might turn out a lamp, and return when the world least expected him. No one could coerce him; only his own heart could move him. And yet here he stood, a captive of familial sentiment.

“Did it not occur to you, before embarking on something so reckless?” I pressed him. “You, who weigh every decision a hundredfold!”

He sat in silence, as still as stone.

“You know,” he murmured at last, “I have always been the sort who would lay down my life for the people I love.”

I struck him lightly but firmly on the chest. “And that,” I said, “is what astounds me — that you, of all people, would succumb to the tyranny of emotional blackmail.”

His head bowed, and he busied his hands with the salt and pepper shakers as if hoping they might deliver him from my reproach.

For the traditional-minded, his choice would doubtless be praised as honourable. But from a standpoint grounded in reason and human dignity, one ought to enter marriage only when heart and soul stand united in readiness — not out of obligation to others, however beloved. It is natural for parents to long for their children’s contentment, but too often this desire is but a thin veil for their own vanity, their fear of social judgement, or their unwillingness to let go.

And the truth remains: it is not only your own life you endanger when you yield to such pressure, but the life of another — a life entrusted to you, one that may be derailed simply to soothe your parents’ anxieties.

My friend, for all his haste, was no child, no green youth to be easily manipulated. Once he had spoken his assent, he could no longer hide behind the excuse of parental insistence. He leapt into deep waters, not for love, nor for hope, but merely to test the temperature.

Marriage is not a festive gathering, a fleeting moment of gaiety and admiration. It is, rather, a solemn covenant — a stewardship of another’s heart and future. To accept such a charge lightly is to court both sorrow and ruin. My friend, alas, learned this too late. For all his cleverness, he made a mistake so basic it has ensnared even the simplest of men: the illusion that one can please everyone.

Yet, I must end on this note: while I have spoken my thoughts with the liberty that true friendship allows, I know well that judgement belongs not to me, nor to any man, but to the inscrutable counsels of each human heart. And so, if I have sounded harsh, I beg forgiveness, for only he knows the full weight of the reasons that led him down this path.

A WOMAN’S ROLE: TRADITION AND MISCONCEPTION

One day, another friend — a woman — asked me, “When you grow old, who will cook for you? Who will care for you and tend the house?”

I was taken aback, almost amused by the narrowness of her question. “You are a woman,” I said, “and yet you reduce your own sex to the rank of servant — cook and maid?”

She tried to wriggle from the implication, taking a generous sip of her wine, and claimed that her meaning had been misunderstood. But the conversation had already strayed into deeper waters.

“That,” I replied, “is the great misconception: the belief that a woman’s role is to keep house and tend hearth. She may very well have no wish to cook, and I might find myself the one holding the ladle, not she. And what then? What, indeed, if the roles reverse?”

She rubbed her forehead, weary and a little conceding. “I see your point,” she said, “but this is how it has always been, since the dawn of time.”

I could only shake my head, still bewildered. “If I want a cook, I will hire one. If I desire a housekeeper, I shall employ one. You women spoil men and then complain when those same men, having grown fat on privilege, trample your freedom beneath their feet.”

She laughed, perhaps a little too readily, and asked, “Do you not miss having children of your own?”

“Children have always managed to annoy me more than they allure me,” I answered with frankness.

“That’s a harsh thing to say,” she replied, though without anger.

“A woman,” I went on, “even one who is clear in her mind that she does not want a child, may one day find herself prey to those age-old instincts. I was not prepared to take that chance.”

“You could have had yourself operated,” she suggested.

I smiled. “Yes, I could have. But as you well know, even that is not always permanent.”

THE CALM OF OLDER WOMEN AND THE WISDOM OF TIME

Another day, my friend Mervyn asked me why I had always been drawn to older women. I told him, simply, that I found in them a calmness — the quietude of one who has seen the world, and made her peace with it. Far better that than the feverish company of a young woman, all jealousy and pettiness, her soul as shallow as a teacup. 

He nodded, and told me a story from his travels. While aboard ship, he had met two couples. One pair was in their nineties — two old souls who had never married, until fate introduced them in a park. There, in the autumn of their lives, they discovered in one another a connection deeper than any youthful infatuation.

The second couple were sweethearts once, married young and parted bitterly after five years. Each went on to marry another, but time, that quiet conspirator, led them back to each other after their spouses had passed away. They remarried, and at the age of eighty, found happiness more profound than ever.

I, too, recalled a little verse I had saved on my phone: “I’ve lost people and found them again. The second time around, things just made more sense. Honestly, timing has a lot to do with everything. Sometimes you aren’t ready for each other yet.”

Mervyn, touched by its truth, sighed. “If only people understood that.”

UNLIKELY MATCHES AND SOCIETY’S DOUBLE STANDARDS

In my own neighbourhood, a young man of twenty-five had once taken up with a woman twice his age. The tongues of the community wagged furiously, for such a pairing is a scandal to our hypocritical society. But what I admired most was their courage to follow their hearts, unmoved by the sneers of the world.

It has long been my belief that one must seek in a companion an intellectual, soulful, and — yes — physical harmony. Without friendship at its core, even the grandest romance crumbles like a house built upon sand.

THE HOLLOW PURSUIT OF CONNECTION WITHOUT EMOTION

And finally, I recall a chance encounter of my own — a girl I met at a party, one of those evenings where drink has a way of loosening both tongues and inhibitions. We retreated to a quiet room, where the game of seduction began, only for me to discover, to my own surprise, that desire would not answer her call.

My body, wiser than my mind, would not permit what my heart had not sanctioned. She, confused, asked me if I was unsure, or worse, if I was broken. But the truth is simpler than all that: I cannot lay with one to whom I am not bound, not by duty or desire, but by genuine connection.

I told her, as gently as I could, that if she were to stop treating her body as though it were a bauble to be bartered for temporary affection, she might spare herself the sorrows — physical and emotional — that await those who mistake freedom for license.

Her response was as sharp as a whip: “Get out.” But the point stands, and I would urge every woman, and every man, to remember: the world’s notion of ‘liberation’ often leads only to enslavement of another kind.

Be real. Be vigilant. And above all, be honest with yourself.

THE GENTLEMAN’S CODE: AN ENDURING IDEAL

I once chanced upon a note in The Gentleman’s Journal, a modest list that read: Doors. Seats. Jackets. Umbrellas. Simple things, you might think, and yet these unassuming gestures are the quiet markers by which the true gentleman is known. It is not the magnificent declarations, but these subtle acts of thoughtfulness that separate mere men from those of cultivated character. Be, then, the man who offers his jacket to a friend when the air turns bitter; be the one who lifts an umbrella over his mother’s head when the rain descends unbidden; and above all, be the man who, without waiting for witness or applause, holds open a door or relinquishes his seat — whether for the woman he loves or the stranger he has never met.

And if, in the present age — this coarse and often unlettered epoch — such deeds are met not with gratitude but with the sneer of suspicion, if the world in its crudeness mistakes kindness for affectation and decency for a sign of one’s sexual orientation, then so be it. Let the world indulge in its hollow jest. You be you: happy, undeterred, unashamed — while they remain as they are, neither happy nor gay, but simply adrift.

Yet let us not forget this truth: however far we may advance in our outward ways, however progressive the age declares itself to be, the bedrock of our value system must remain unshaken — rooted firmly in propriety and forged from the steady iron of character. Alas, it is the great misfortune of our times that this value-based compass, once so universally shared, has fallen into disrepair. Is it any wonder, then, that so many souls appear adrift, like ships without rudders, lost in the great sea of existence?

Rather than allow ourselves to be devoured by the same disreputable forces that breed such drift, let us, by quiet example, reintroduce into daily life the customs and convictions that once endowed man with dignity and purpose. Let us not be shaken from our gentlemanly manners, even when mockery stands before us grinning. Let us carry ourselves with grace, treating both women and men with equal courtesy, not for the world’s approval but for the quiet dignity of doing right.

Let us not wield our masculinity as a weapon to oppress or subdue, nor entertain the base and desolate notion that manhood entitles one to treat any being — human or otherwise — as a vessel for conquest. Let us resist the vulgar temptation to regard women as mere objects for gratification, for this is not the path of a gentleman, but of a fool.

Let us choose openness over prejudice, and understanding over scorn. Let us recognise the simple but oft-forgotten truth: some are drawn to women, some to men, some to both, and some to none at all. Such matters ought not divide us but rather humble us, for we are all creatures of complexity, shaped by forces seen and unseen.

And let us not exhaust ourselves trying to silence the many-headed inquisitors — the modern-day Briareus — who reach and pry into the lives of others, for their meddlesome nature is beyond our power to cure. Instead, let us strive to dispel ignorance, to unravel misconceptions, and to make space for kindness where once there was only judgment. Let us honour love in all its strange and splendid forms. Let us hold in reverence the quiet nobility of human emotion, for these invisible treasures are worth more than the outward details of whom one loves.

And so, my people, let us remember always: each soul is a unique note in the symphony of creation, and it is precisely this diversity — this splendid, baffling, and sometimes inconvenient variety — that renders the world so endlessly worth inhabiting. It is this that lends each of us a distinctive melody, and this that makes us worthy of one another’s respect.

Let us be, in all things, gentlemen.