All Noise, No Courage

Recently, I have noticed a strange kind of admiration for people who are rude in public. Someone shouts over another person, throws in a few abuses, and the video is celebrated as a “savage reply”. A film character humiliates someone and we are expected to cheer. In everyday life too, the person who speaks respectfully is sometimes called timid, while the one who creates a scene is treated as strong.

I do not understand when we began confusing a lack of restraint with courage.

There are times when a firm response is necessary. Wrongdoing must be challenged. An unfair order should be refused. A person being mistreated deserves support, even if speaking up brings consequences. I have far more respect for someone who takes that stand than for someone who stays silent to protect their own comfort.

But what exactly is brave about abusing a stranger, mocking a colleague or shouting at someone who cannot shout back? Such behaviour is often performed in front of an audience. It demands attention immediately and costs very little. The harder test comes when there is no audience, when the person doing wrong has power over you, and when standing by the truth could cost you something.

That is where firmness begins. Volume has nothing to do with it.

Social media has made the distinction easy to forget. A short clip can show an insult and the applause that follows it. It rarely shows what happened before, whether the insult was justified, or what damage was left afterwards. Films have their own reason to favour a dramatic confrontation. But when we carry that performance into ordinary life, we begin treating other people as targets for a clever line.

The result is a cheap idea of personality: be abrasive, call it honesty; be disrespectful, call it independence; lose your temper, call it strength. It is a poor standard for a society to admire. Abusing someone requires no particular intelligence. Humiliating a person in front of others requires no moral courage. If anything, it shows how little control the speaker has over the power of their own words.

Indian thought places a much higher value on restraint. In the Bhagavad Gita, Shri Krishna includes truthfulness, freedom from anger, peace, compassion and refraining from slander among the qualities he describes:

अहिंसा सत्यमक्रोधस्त्यागः शान्तिरपैशुनम्।
दया भूतेष्वलोलुप्त्वं मार्दवं ह्रीरचापलम्॥
— Bhagavad Gita 16.2

Notice that truth and freedom from anger appear together. We have started behaving as though an angry delivery makes a statement more truthful. Often it merely makes the speaker feel more powerful for a moment.

Krishna also describes a person of steady wisdom as one whose mind is not easily shaken by hardship and who is free from attachment, fear and anger:

दुःखेष्वनुद्विग्नमनाः सुखेषु विगतस्पृहः।
वीतरागभयक्रोधः स्थितधीर्मुनिरुच्यते॥
— Bhagavad Gita 2.56

That is a demanding ideal. Most of us will lose our temper at times. But the ideal is revealing: a steady mind is praised as strength. Being ruled by every provocation is hardly a mark of freedom.

There is also a discipline in how we tell the truth. The Gita speaks of words that are truthful, beneficial and considerate:

अनुद्वेगकरं वाक्यं सत्यं प्रियहितं च यत्।
स्वाध्यायाभ्यसनं चैव वाङ्मयं तप उच्यते॥
— Bhagavad Gita 17.15

This does not mean making every difficult truth pleasant. Some truths will upset people, especially those benefiting from what is wrong. It means we should know the difference between saying what needs to be said and taking pleasure in causing hurt. “I am just brutally honest” is too often an excuse for enjoying the brutality.

Our stories of divine strength make the same distinction in a different way. Maa Durga confronts Mahishasura with overwhelming force. The Devi Mahatmya describes her striking him with her trident:

एवमुक्त्वा समुत्पत्य सारूढा तं महासुरम्।
पादेनाक्रम्य कण्ठे च शूलेनैनमताडयत्॥
— Devi Mahatmya 3.40

Her strength is decisive. It is directed at a grave threat. The lesson I take from this is not that a powerful person must always be gentle. It is that power needs judgment. Every disagreement is not Mahishasura. Every irritation does not deserve a weapon, whether that weapon is in our hands or in our speech.

Shri Ram shows another side of strength. In the Valmiki Ramayana, after defeating an exhausted Ravana in battle, he tells him to return to Lanka, recover and come back prepared:

प्रयाहि जानामि रणार्दितस्त्वं।
प्रविश्य रात्रिंचरराज लङ्काम्।
अश्वस्य निर्याहि रथी च धन्वी।
तदा बलं प्रेक्ष्यसि मे रथस्थः॥
— Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda 6.59.143

Ram does not abandon his fight against Ravana. He also has no need to turn that moment into an exhibition of cruelty. His restraint does not diminish his resolve; it shows how secure that resolve is.

That, to me, is class. It has nothing to do with clothes, English fluency, social position or a polished public image. It is the ability to hold a firm position without making another person’s humiliation your reward. It is knowing when to argue, when to refuse, and when to act, while remaining in command of yourself.

A person can say, calmly, “I will not approve this because it is wrong.” A person can confront a superior with facts and refuse to sign a false report. A person can defend a colleague whom everyone else is mocking. None of these actions becomes stronger by adding abuses. In many situations, staying measured makes the stand harder to dismiss.

We should be especially wary of people who perform toughness only with those below them. Anyone can shout at a waiter, a junior employee or a stranger behind a screen. If someone is polite to the powerful and insulting to the powerless, the behaviour is neither rebellion nor honesty. It is cowardice dressed up as confidence.

I am not arguing that people must sound calm every minute of their lives. Anger is human, and sometimes it is the first sign that our conscience is still working. But anger should move us towards a response to the wrong. When we begin celebrating abuse itself, we have forgotten the purpose of speaking up.

A society of strong individuals should be able to disagree fiercely without making disrespect fashionable. We should teach people to question, to resist and to stand firm. We should also be honest enough to call public humiliation what it is: a crude performance that lowers the speaker along with the person being attacked.

The truly strong person can make a room uncomfortable by telling the truth. They do not need to make themselves vulgar to do it.

Why Distant Stars Feel Like Home

     There are moments when I look at the night sky and feel something that is difficult to explain. It is not merely curiosity about planets, galaxies or the possibility of life elsewhere. It feels more personal—as if some part of me is connected to those distant stars, unexplored worlds and the vast darkness beyond everything we know.

Of course, I know that I belong here. My life, responsibilities and relationships are all rooted on Earth. Yet the universe often feels more inviting than many familiar places. A distant galaxy that I will never visit can sometimes create a stronger feeling in me than the busy world immediately around me.

Why does the unknown feel so familiar?

Much of human life is spent inside small circles, deadlines, targets, hierarchies, disagreements, expectations and the constant need to prove something. These things are important in their own context, but they can also consume our entire field of vision. A minor conflict begins to feel enormous. A temporary failure feels permanent. The opinion of one person can disturb several days of our lives.

Then we look at the sky.

The scale changes instantly. Earth becomes one small planet orbiting an ordinary star. Our Sun becomes one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, and our galaxy becomes one among countless galaxies in the observable universe. The problems do not disappear, but they return to their proper size.

Perhaps that is one reason I feel drawn to distant stars: the universe offers immensity without pettiness, mystery without manipulation, and silence without emptiness.

It does not ask who won an argument. It does not care about titles, status or social approval. It simply exists, vast, patient and indifferent to our everyday dramas. Strangely, that indifference does not feel cold to me. It feels liberating.

I have always been attracted to systems, causes and unanswered questions. At work, when a process fails, we search for the reason. We collect data, study patterns, test possibilities and try to find a solution. The universe is the greatest unfinished problem imaginable, but it comes without a final answer sheet.

What existed before the universe as we understand it? Is space infinite, or does it only appear so from within? Is life common, or are we an extraordinary accident? Are there forms of intelligence so different from us that we might not even recognise them as life? What lies beyond the part of the universe we can observe?

Every answer seems to open the door to several new questions.

That is the beauty of it. On Earth, we are often uncomfortable when we do not know something. In the universe, not knowing becomes an invitation. The unexplored is not a gap to be embarrassed about; it is a horizon asking us to keep moving.

This is where science and imagination meet. Science tells us what the evidence allows us to say. Imagination asks what may still be possible. One keeps us grounded; the other prevents the boundaries of present knowledge from becoming the boundaries of thought.

There may also be an element of refuge in this fascination.

The human world is noisy not only because of machines, traffic and phones, but because of judgments and expectations. We are constantly being measured: by our performance, income, position, age, choices and conformity to what others consider normal. Even leisure is sometimes turned into another competition.

A distant star asks nothing from us.

We do not have to impress it. We do not need to explain ourselves to it. We can simply look at it and wonder. There is freedom in being curious without needing to produce an immediate result.

This does not necessarily mean that a fascination with space is a desire to escape life. Escape is about running away from something. Wonder is about moving towards something larger. Looking at the universe can actually bring us back to life with a calmer mind and a wider perspective.

The sky does not solve our problems, but it reminds us that our problems are not the whole of existence.

Perhaps this is also why stories of exploration have always stayed with me, from Jules Verne's travellers and inventors to the distant worlds of Star Wars. The technology, spacecraft and alien landscapes are exciting, but they are not the real reason these stories endure.

At their heart, they are about crossing the known boundary.

They ask what happens when human beings travel beyond the maps prepared for them. They imagine places where the old rules may no longer apply and where courage, curiosity and character matter more than familiarity. Their fictional worlds give shape to a very real human instinct: the refusal to believe that the visible horizon is the end of everything.

When I think about unexplored planets or civilizations among distant stars, I am not only thinking about geography. I am imagining possibilities different ways in which life, society, intelligence and even reality itself might exist.

There is also a scientific truth behind this emotional connection. The elements that make our bodies were formed through cosmic processes. The carbon in our cells, the oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood have histories older than Earth. Earlier generations of stars created and dispersed many of these elements long before our planet existed.

In that sense, looking at the stars is not simply looking at something outside us. It is matter shaped by the universe becoming conscious enough to look back at the universe.

That thought changes the relationship. The stars are not merely distant objects decorating the night sky. They are part of the same cosmic history that eventually produced oceans, forests, cities, memories and human curiosity.

Perhaps the connection feels real because, at the most fundamental level, it is real.

The unexplored universe also represents hope. A fully known world would be a very small world. Mystery leaves room for discovery, and discovery leaves room for the future to be different from the present.

Somewhere beyond what we can see may be a planet with an unfamiliar sky. Somewhere, perhaps, life may be asking the same questions that we ask. Or perhaps the universe is silent, and consciousness is far rarer than we imagine. Either possibility is profound.

We may never personally reach another star. Most of the places that inspire us will remain forever beyond our physical reach. But not everything meaningful has to be possessed or visited. Sometimes a distant horizon changes us simply by existing.

It gives the mind somewhere to travel when ordinary life becomes too narrow.

Some people feel deeply rooted in a hometown, a tradition or a familiar landscape. I understand that feeling. But perhaps there is another kind of belonging, a belonging not to a particular place, but to the act of searching.

Maybe I do not feel connected to distant stars because I believe I was born on the wrong planet or in the wrong time. Maybe the attraction comes from recognising something essential in myself: the need to look beyond what is already known.

The universe is large enough to hold both the analytical mind and the imaginative one. It offers facts to study, mysteries to explore and silence in which to think. It reminds us that knowledge is still incomplete and that existence is far more extraordinary than our routines make it appear.

So perhaps I am not trying to escape Earth when I look towards distant stars. Perhaps I am trying to remember that Earth is part of something much greater.