Learning to Succeed, Forgetting to Care
In the 1990s, growing up in Paradip in India’s Odisha state, a town of salt winds and monsoon-soaked mornings, I lived in what the Greeks might have called communitas: a spontaneous and unspoken togetherness. Friendships were not curated by permission; we played with whoever ran into the same street: cricket, pitto, satapu, hide and seek. There was no talk of caste, class, or religion among children. And during festivals, whether it was Diwali, Eid, Kartik Purnima, Holi, or Raja Parba (our own festival of the earth and femininity), we simply celebrated. No one asked who belonged where. The joy felt indivisible.
This is not to say we lived in harmony or utopia. Communitas does not mean the absence of conflict or hierarchy. It means learning how to live with others in spite of them. There were divisions -- social, economic, and emotional -- but they were absorbed into a larger ethic of togetherness. What mattered was that the instinct to care, to respond, to belong, was still alive in daily gestures.
In those years, problems in a household were not suffered alone. News of illness or loss rippled organically through neighborhoods -- carried by voices, not apps. Neighbors showed up not as saviors but as fellow travelers, bringing food, time, and presence. I remember how the super cyclone of 1999 (possibly the world’s biggest cyclone until that date) flattened roofs and flooded homes, causing thousands of deaths. But it could not wash away this ethic of care. People helped not as volunteers or NGOs, but as humans, without announcements, without performance.
There was, too, a quiet faith in schooling. We believed that education would lift everything: poverty, inequality, even sorrow. It was a time when people earned little but smiled more, fought less, and perhaps felt more whole. Today, I see many with degrees, smartphones, and salaries, but rarely with peace. The face of the middle class has changed, but so has its heart. Even earlier, among the salaried and upwardly mobile, a quiet retreat had begun: a pulling inward, a soft distrust of the shared. We didn’t recognize it then, but something ancient was dimming. A slow disconnection had begun.
FROM COMMUNITAS TO CIVITAS: THE RISE OF A MEASURED LIFE
With the acceleration of industrialization and later the silent invasion of globalization, towns like Paradip began to change. Not with fanfare, but with quiet displacement. The transformation was not just in roads or ports, but in how people began to imagine their own worth. The rise of the middle class and the so-called educated class was followed by a deeper erosion of language, of empathy, of the unscripted warmth that once defined small-town life. The port’s vast expansion promised opportunity, yet left many laborers jobless, their skills outdated by cranes and containers.
In place of old solidarities came a new model of society, what the Romans called civitas: structured, rule-bound, hierarchical. Alongside it grew the religion of success. I remember when elders spoke of becoming a better human being as the highest goal of learning. That phrase now feels like a relic. Today, it is not the means that matter, but the metrics. Children are taught not how to wonder, but how to win. The pressure is constant; be a multitasker, a prodigy, a future star. Childhood is no longer a space of play, but a rehearsal for performance.
Even play itself has changed. Where we once played for joy -- for the fall, the laughter, the thrill of forgetting time -- today’s games reward only the winner. Every game has become finite: a trophy, a rank, a validation. In families too, a new anxiety has set in. Mothers, once intuitive nurturers of emotion, are now forced to become strategic planners. Whom a child befriends, what activities they pursue: everything is silently governed by aspiration and fear.
This shift has created not only anxiety, but a certain emotional dullness. Empathy is no longer seen as wise. Time spent without “results” is a threat. The city’s speed has entered the veins of the village, and with it, the soul of Paradip has begun to thin.
FRACTURING OF BELONGING
Over the last twenty to twenty-five years, as globalization transformed landscapes and aspirations, something else also rose, quietly, and almost everywhere. Across continents, from small towns to metropolises, a certain kind of politics of separation began to harden. Not only in India, but globally, we have witnessed the gradual ascent of right-wing ideologies, rooted less in tradition and more in identity, in the construction of “us” and “them,” insiders and outsiders.
In small towns like Paradip, the effects are not always visible in dramatic gestures, but they are deeply felt. The unspoken sense of shared life, what I once called communitas, now bears fractures that were unthinkable in my childhood. There is a growing atmosphere of caution: what one says, how one celebrates, whom one invites. People still help each other during cyclones, still feed one another in death and illness; but the spontaneity has thinned. It takes more effort to trust. The common has become conditional.
Among the younger generation, more exposed to online ideologies than to shared streets, I sense an emotional fatigue. The desire to connect has been replaced by the fear of offending. Minorities, especially, carry a quiet anxiety: not always spoken, but deeply lived. And yet, no one shouts. That’s the tragedy. It is not loud hate but quiet withdrawal that is shaping this era.
The shift is global, but in Paradip, I feel its echo most sharply in the silences: between neighbors, between generations, between memories and the present. Where once festivals united, now they are approached with caution. Where once belonging was natural, now it is negotiated. Something has broken, not in law, but in spirit.
GANDHI’S FORGOTTEN WARNINGS
In an interview with Rev. Dr. John R. Mott, Mahatma Gandhi warned of a troubling trend: “The hard-heartedness of the educated”. Not that they lacked empathy, he said, but that their emotional capacities had been blunted by their training. This was in 1937. And today, nearly ninety years later, we still face the same malaise.
Gandhi’s fear was not simply colonial. It was civilizational. The West promised that education would redeem us; that through science, industry, and schools, the world would be repaired. That dream continues. Barack Obama, like countless global leaders, insists that education is the key to equality and peace. But Gandhi never agreed. Education can produce skills. But it cannot ensure conscience.
I do not oppose schooling. But I have seen how formal learning often arms the mind while disarming the heart. Gandhi knew this. That is why his real hope lay in those who chose nonviolence not through theory, but through intuition. “The great thing is that the people have responded to nonviolence… That fills me with hope.”
But what fills us with hope now? Dowry cases increased in the 80s and 90s. Religious tensions have hardened. Superficial nationalism has grown. Education has made us literate, but not necessarily just. We speak eloquently, but forget how to care.
I felt the full weight of Gandhi’s warning during a recent moment of conscience. I had signed a civilizational appeal to the Prime Minister, on behalf of the children of Gaza, amidst genocide and despair. But what startled me was not the violence itself, it was the hardness I encountered among friends, colleagues, and the so-called educated. They did not lack intelligence. But something had closed inside. The very thing Gandhi feared: the blunting of moral instinct by intellectual pride stood before me, not in theory, but in familiar faces.
Schooling, education, and literacy may have made us citizens of the nation-state, but not the humans our inner conscience and our forefathers once hoped we would be.
BEYOND PARADIP: THE GLOBAL EROSION OF THE COMMONS
Though I haven’t travelled abroad, what I see in Paradip reflects something larger. This disheartenment is not just local; it is Indian and may be global. Across India, people have been reshaped not as citizens or neighbours, but as consumers. We are taught to desire, not to belong.
Public transport is mocked, private cars are celebrated. Public health is dismissed if one can afford private insurance. Libraries, universities, ration shops -- these are seen as relics. What matters is smooth roads, CCTV cameras, gated safety. Even climate change barely stirs public concern unless it disrupts personal convenience. The planet burns, but as long as the air-conditioner works, it feels distant.
This is not merely economic change, it is moral collapse. The commons has vanished not just as a place, but as an idea. We no longer ask what kind of society we want. We ask only what services we get. What began as privatization of infrastructure has become privatization of emotion. And what is lost is not measurable; but it is immense.
A CALL TO REMEMBER DHARMA
In our time, Dharma is often mistranslated as religion. But its true meaning is older and deeper. Dharma is not belief; it is responsibility. It stands against matsya nyaya: the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest. Indic civilization, and Gandhi’s ethic, stood for the opposite: the care of the meek, the honoring of the fragile.
But that Dharma is fading. The educated and the aspiring have forgotten their duties; to family, to animals, to rivers, to memory, to the unseen dead and the yet unborn. We are raising children to be performers, not caretakers. We speak of justice, but forget to offer kindness. We know our rights, but ignore our debts to one another and to the world.
If we are to recover from this age of disheartenment, it must begin not in courts or parliaments, but in conscience. We must remember Dharma. Not in temples, but in kitchens. Not in slogans, but in gestures. To protect, to preserve, to pause.
Paradip still carries fragments of that way of life; in certain homes, in shared meals, in moments of storm. But the question is no longer what we remember. It is: can we still choose to live it?
