SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican ( Luke 18: 9-14 ) perfectly mirrors the spiritual crisis of Blaise Meredith in the novel The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West . At the beginning of the novel, Monsignor Blaise Meredith discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. This terminal diagnosis forces a brutal reckoning: he realises that despite being a priest and a respected canon lawyer in the Vatican, he has never truly loved, suffered with others, or experienced genuine human connection. He has hidden behind the rigid rules, paperwork, and safe bureaucracy of the Roman Curia . His faith is orthodox but entirely bloodless. His primary struggle is the terrifying realisation that he is facing death without ever having truly lived. For most of his life, Meredith unknowingly embodied the spirit of the Pharisee. The Pharisee approached God "full of himself; and he went back unchanged" . Similarly, Meredith built his life in the Roman Curia on orthodox correctness and canonic...

  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus commands His disciples with a charge that has never stopped to unsettle: “ Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect ” ( Matthew 5: 48 ). The word lands like a stone thrown into still water. Circles of interpretation ripple outward. How? In what manner? By what conceivable standard? Thirteen chapters later, the answer arrives—not as an abstraction, not as a philosophical treatise, but as a parable about a king, a debt, and a man who could not do what had been done for him (Matthew 18: 21–35). The perfection Jesus spoke of on the mountain now has a name, a shape, and a practice. It is mercy . Christian perfection is not the perfection of the philosopher—the cold ideal untouched by human frailty. It is the perfection of the Father who “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5: 45). Divine perfection is not distance from the wounded. It is inexhaustible movement toward them. Mercy...

 Learning undeniably builds one’s intelligence. Learning is difficult, and real scholarship is rare. As we undergo studies, we ourselves ask, when will I get done with it: assignments, exams, dissertations, presentation and so on. And we dismiss any further learning, saying, learning is only for the most intelligent and strongest. But history proves otherwise. People who have stayed with something long enough, arrives—it is true with education too. Think of Charles Darwin . He was not considered a brilliant student. His own father fed up of him, once seems to have said, he cares for nothing but hitting stray dogs and catching rats. Darwin himself has said that his teachers and father considered him to be 'a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. And yet, this ordinary boy developed the habit of noticing. He watched. He asked questions no one else thought to ask. He kept writing down what he noticed as a boy. And He gave the evolutionary world one of its m...

 The essence of KM Gaffoor ’s Malayalam poem Yudham ( War) could be translated this way: over small things, we lose our patience and cool, we grow in anger and revenge. When the food had a little less salt, we struck the table in frustration, and pushed the plate away. When someone gave a harsh feedback we banged the door so hard. When a glass slipped and shattered, we raised our hands in punishment. Over small things — a meal, a feedback, a mistake — we became storms. ‘This is us.’ And then we, seeing the horrors of war, ask, what is war?   Why is there war? KM Gaffoor answers it plainly: ‘War is simply us, made larger .’ War is not something that happens out there, between nations and armies and strangers on maps. War is something that happens in here — in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the spaces between people who are supposed to live with each other.

 A religious person will do what he is told, no matter what is right; where as a spiritual person will do what is right, no matter what is told. The religious person — and I mean this in the narrowest, most cautionary sense — does what he is told, not because he has understood why, but because he has been taught that understanding is unnecessary, perhaps even dangerous. Obedience becomes the highest virtue. And obedience , unchecked, has a long and terrible history. It was obedience that allowed ordinary German soldiers to operate concentration camps. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — she expected to find a monster. What she found instead was a quiet, rather dull bureaucrat who kept repeating, almost plaintively, that he had only been following orders. She called it the banality of evil . Evil, she observed, does not always come dressed in malice. Sometimes it comes dressed in compliance . A...

  Performative leadership is a style of management where individuals prioritise the appearance of being a leader over the actual responsibility of leading. Often described as leadership theatre , it focuses on high-visibility actions, such as public speeches or symbolic gestures, that lack substantive follow-through or real impact on the team's well-being and productivity.  Common Signs of Performative Leadership are: Language without follow-through or intention : long speeches and frequent use of buzzwords like "transparency," "empowerment," or " psychological safety " in presentations, with no changes in day-to-day operations. Over-reliance on optics and visibility : a heavy focus on how initiatives will be perceived externally or by superiors, rather than how they are experienced by the team. Scripted vulnerability : sharing personal struggles or failures in a way that feels rehearsed or "PR-ready," avoiding any real emotional risk. Feedb...

  Hannah Arendt , a German and American historian and philosopher, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century, diagnosed it plainly: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution." She was talking about what power does to the human animal. There is a particular kind of freedom that belongs only to people who have not yet won anything. The student who hasn't yet built a career can say anything about the system. The artist without a reputation can make work that offends everyone. The activist without an institution behind them can demand the impossible. Their radicalism is not just ideological — it is structural . They can afford it. The cost of speaking the truth is low when you have nothing built that the truth could demolish. This is why every great movement in history has been led by young people, by the poor, by the recently arrived, by those the existing order has already written off. They were...

  Haruki Murakami , a Japanese author, said this in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . He was writing about something as ordinary as a sore body during a long-distance race . But like all simple sentences that stay with you, it was really about something much larger — about being alive. Pain and suffering sound like the same thing. We use them almost interchangeably. But Murakami is pointing at a gap between them — a small but life-changing gap. Pain is what happens to you. Your knee hurts. You lose someone you love. A dream falls through. The world does this to you whether you agree to it or not. It does not ask permission. It does not wait until you are ready. Pain is the tax of being human. Suffering , though, is what happens inside you, after the pain arrives. It is the story you tell yourself about the pain. It is the weight you strap onto it. It is the question you keep asking — Why me? Why now? Why this? — even though no answer is coming. Sufferin...

  Ego is the voice inside us that says ‘I’ — loudly, persistently, and almost always at the expense of ‘we.’ It goes by many names: pride, self-importance, confidence, self-esteem. Spiritual teachers across traditions have called it the false self , the small self, the self we must outgrow. Whatever the name, the behaviour is the same. Ego grasps. It reaches for power, money, position, recognition — not because these things are wrong in themselves, but because ego can never hold enough of them. It is a hunger with no bottom. It never arrives. It never says: this is enough. Richard Rohr puts it starkly: for ego, everything is a commodity. Everything can be acquired, traded, leveraged. Even God. In Matthew 20: 20–28 , a mother comes to Jesus with a request. She wants her two sons — James and John — to sit at his right and left hand when he comes into his Kingdom. It is a breathtaking ask. And what makes it more than a footnote is the way she asks it. She kneels. She adopts the pos...

 Think about the last real argument you had — with a partner, a friend, a colleague. While they were still mid-sentence, something in your brain had already started its engine. You were finding the flaw, preparing your counter, mentally lining up your words. You heard sounds, but you weren't really there. This is the first kind of listening the document describes: listening that is already formulating its response. It's egoistic. Its whole point is to win. This isn't because we're bad people. It's because our ego is frightened. If what they're saying is true, something we believe might have to die. And the ego doesn't die quietly. The second kind of listening looks civilised — and it is. But just barely. This is the polite dinner-table version. We wait. We don't interrupt. We nod at appropriate moments. But underneath, both people are just taking turns broadcasting . You speak. I wait. Then I say what I was going to say anyway. Two monologues wearing the...

 We are quick to blame the person. When a leader disappoints us, when a leader becomes the thing she once opposed, when a man who spoke of liberation finds himself, years later, administering the same quiet oppressions he once named — we call it hypocrisy. We say he changed. We say she forgot where she came from. We say power corrupts. And perhaps sometimes it does. But far more often, something else is happening. Something less dramatic and more structural. Something that deserves a different word entirely. The word is architecture. A building shapes the people who live in it before they ever make a single decision. The height of a ceiling affects how freely a person thinks. The arrangement of chairs in a room determines who speaks and who listens. The placement of the executive floor above all the others is not a neutral choice; it is a lesson in hierarchy delivered daily, silently, through the feet. We absorb the structure of our spaces long before we begin to question them. And...

 There is a difference between a man who is feared and a man who is trusted. Both may walk into a room and find it fall quiet. But the quality of that silence is entirely different. One silence is the silence of held breath; the other is the silence of attention. One empties a room of ease; the other fills it with it. We know this distinction instinctively. And yet, again and again, in our institutions, our homes, our public life, we confuse the two. We pursue the silence of fear and call it respect. Respect that is demanded is not respect at all. It is concession — the appearance of deference worn by people who have been given no other option. A child who calls an adult ‘sir’ out of the threat of punishment is not showing reverence; he is showing survival. A subordinate who nods along in a meeting, who never disagrees, who praises work she privately finds poor — she is not honouring her superior; she is protecting herself. Demanded respect produces perfect mimicry of the real thin...

 There is a kind of seeing that ordinary life will not permit. The valley is too loud, too close, too insistent. It fills the eyes with the immediate and the urgent, leaving no room for the vast. And so, across the ages, those who have needed to see clearly have done the one thing that changes everything: they have climbed. Transfiguration is, at its heart, a story about what happens when we dare to rise above the level at which we are condemned to live. It is not, as it might first appear, merely a miraculous episode in the life of Jesus. It is a grammar — a recurring pattern in the human encounter with the divine — written first in the life of Moses, then in the life of Elijah, and reaching its fullest expression on an unnamed mountain where three disciples stood blinking in astonishing light. Moses knew the valley well. He had led a people through it for decades — a people prone to grumbling, prone to despair, prone to fashioning golden gods whenever the true God felt too slow i...