Some news we read, some we watch online, but a few we encounter in real life—and they haunt us the most. A 19-year-old who scored 99.99 percentile in NEET ending his life despite remarkable success is not just a story of academic pressure, but of deeper alienation. Too often, family bonds are marked by a sense of otherness—expectations without empathy, calculation without connection. He could not make his family see that his dream was not only medicine—it was something else.
On a visit to a village in Bihar, I met a ten-year-old boy, not as a child of promise but already trapped in drugs. The shock was not only that narcotics were being sold openly in village shops with the knowledge of police and guards, but that nobody cared. “It is not our child, our children are very sincere” people said. This chilling sense of otherness—the absence of shared responsibility—is far more dangerous than the drugs themselves.
The same silence echoes beyond our borders. According to UNICEF, more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023. Yet in India, except for a few intellectuals, public discussion is muted. “It is not our country,” many say. This is otherness at its starkest—when we see mass suffering but choose indifference. And yet, there are also those who, driven by a sense of oneness, risk everything—sailing boats across seas to break the siege of Gaza. One stance is alienation, the other solidarity.
Even in our public life the contrast is visible. A political rally in Tamil Nadu turned into a deadly stampede, and instead of shared grief and accountability, what followed was a familiar blame game between parties and administrations. Once again, oneness gave way to otherness.
We have lost faith in politics. No matter which party we support, we know the truth behind the crafted images. Vast sums are spent creating or destroying political personalities. Teams of content creators manipulate emotions, trends, and psychology to build influence. Words and visuals are tools, not truth. Touching hearts cannot come from manufactured speeches and visuals; it can only come from something real, something lived, something from the heart.
These stories—from a brilliant student’s suicide to a child lost in drugs, from Gaza’s devastated children to a rally turned tragedy—point to one truth: our deepest crisis is not only poverty, violence, or politics, but the erosion of oneness. The real question before us is: how do we move from the comfort of otherness to the courage of oneness?
In sharp contrast, lakhs of people in Assam gathered peacefully to mourn singer Zubeen Garg—bound not by politics or obligation, but by love and shared grief. His passing was not felt as the loss of an entertainer, but as the breaking of something intimate, something within. For countless people, Zubeen was not outside of them—he was part of their own identity, their own being. This is the essence of oneness: when a life touches us so deeply that its absence feels like our own wound, and when grief becomes not division but a bond that unites.
Being born and brought up in North India, I had not known Zubeen Garg personally—my own limitation. But when I witnessed lakhs of people singing together to bid him farewell, I understood his presence was far greater than fame. His voice and music carried the beauty of a culture and a language, expanding their reach while holding their truth. He was not only a singer, but the voice of the people—standing fearlessly against discrimination, speaking with honesty and power.
At his final journey, there was no stampede, no chaos. Lakhs marched to see him one last time, singing in unison—not with rehearsal, but with a spontaneous harmony born of love. How does such a connection happen? How does one man’s presence and music weave itself so deeply into the lives of so many? Perhaps it is because he awakened in them a sense of oneness—a reminder that identity is not divided but shared, not outside us but within. And this raises the deeper question: how can such oneness be nurtured in our fractured times?
Zubeen Garg’s voice was not merely the voice of a music star—it was everyone’s voice. That is why his loss felt personal, why it became part of people’s identity and being. This is oneness: the ability to hold immense love within oneself, to make others feel that closeness, as though he were a family member. He lived his values openly—standing for causes, protesting against
injustice, protecting the environment, challenging the status quo. His life and art were inseparable from his beliefs.
And his pauses—ah, those pauses—were the true vessels of connection. His performances were full of silence, of unspoken presence that touched people at a profound level. He did not perform humility; he was not concerned with appearances, his smiles, alcohol, or tears. In one show, he quietly sat on the floor of the stage, watching the audience with eyes that seemed to hold entire oceans. That gaze unfolded deep silence and love, calling countless rivers of emotion to merge into the seas of shared humanity. Quiet tears would flow, and yet his eyes radiated a light that carried the essence of oneness.
In one interview, he said: “I am water—formless, free. No shape is mine, yet I become all shapes. If you put me in a cup, I will become the cup. If you put me in a plate, I will spread as the plate. Let me fall on the table, I will flow wide as the table itself. Mind should be like water. Shapeless. And the one unique thing about water is that it is gentlest of all things, soft beyond measure, yet when it is provoked, water can break the toughest and hardest things on earth. Look at the Brahmaputra. It is so calm and flows so gently. But when it roars, it can shake everything. This is Zubeen Garg: gentle, full of love, and powerful beyond measure.
He was unpredictable, not because he was erratic, but because he was authentic. He followed his inner call rather than the scripts of fame. Eating, speaking, performing—he did everything fully, in the presence of his true self, without concern for who was watching. The oneness he nurtured was not manufactured, it was lived. Through music, silence, action, and presence, he became a fellow traveler for countless people—not just a star, but a catalyst, a genuine connector of hearts. If a musician can transcend ego and conditions to embody such love for his community and humanity, why can we not strive to do the same in our surroundings?How do we move from the comfort of otherness to the courage of oneness?
We aspire for a world that lives with a sense of oneness, that loves with a sense of oneness.
