A love letter to a species that forgot how tall it is by Charudutta Panigrahi
Somewhere between the first fire and the latest headline, we became the only species that brews its own storm and then complains about the weather.
Look at us. We are astonishing. We split the atom and, with equal aplomb, the family. We decode genomes and each other’s silences. We send a whisper across an ocean in less time than it takes a sigh to leave the chest. And yet, with the very hands that composed the Gita, the sonnets, and the Sistine ceiling, we stir — daily, diligently, almost devotionally — a cauldron of our own making: wars nobody’s grandmother asked for, greed that eats its own children, corruptions dressed as cleverness and efficiencies, cruelties small enough to fit in a comment box and large enough to empty a city. We stoke it. We season it. We simmer in it. And then we tilt our faces to the heavens and ask why life tastes bitter. The other alternative is also given to us, the one to grow vertical to the depth of the spirits, but we prove ‘small’ for that.
The heavens, one imagines, are sorely tempted to echo: taste what you cooked.
Consider the arithmetic of our existence. Stars had to die to donate calcium to our bones; the iron in our blood was forged in the furnace of a supernova; fourteen billion years of cosmic labour conspired to produce this morning’s cup of tea and the warm hand that holds it. Every breath we draw is a loan from a forest. Every heartbeat is an unearned instalment of wonder — roughly a hundred thousand of them a day, delivered free, no invoice attached. Such is the scale of endowment. Life was not achieved by us. It was bestowed upon us, wrapped in dawn, ribboned with birdsong, and signed by something far larger than our petty and fiendish squabbles.
And what do we do with the bestowal? We belittle it. This is our quietest crime. We shrink the miracle until it fits our mood. We measure our irreplaceable days against a neighbour’s car or her flat. We scroll past sunrises to study the grievances of strangers. We audit our blessings for defects, wear cynicism as if it were sophistication, and treat wonder as something to be outgrown, like milk teeth. The modern mind has become a connoisseur of complaint — exquisite palate, terrible diet. Ingratitude, practised daily, hardens into a philosophy; and a philosophy of ingratitude is just despair wearing reading glasses.
So the cauldron is not made of crimes alone. It is made of shrugs, of eye-rolls, of the ten thousand small refusals to be amazed — more than refusals, obstinate boorishness and appalling stupidity. But here is the thing about cauldrons, the clause the fine print forgot: they have no lids. Nothing seals us in but habit. The exit has always been vertical. The pressure cooker too releases vertical.
The East has known this forever and pressed it into a single flower. The lotus does not rise despite the mud; it rises because of it. The muck is not its shame but its syllabus — every rotting thing at the bottom of the pond becomes fuel for the bloom at the top. The lotus performs, each morning, the most subversive act in nature: it converts filth into fragrance and never once looks embarrassed about its address. The mud, it turns out, was never meant to be a destiny.
And nature, patient teacher that she is, keeps modelling the ascent for us, hoping we will finally take notes. The dawn does not sulk about the night; it simply outgrows it. The monsoon rises from the very sea it once fell into, and returns as a blessing to the fields. Sap climbs a hundred feet of deodar against gravity’s explicit objection. So does the pepper on coffee in Araku. The lark does not check the news before singing. Even the humble kite — that poor man’s aircraft dancing over our terraces — knows the secret: it soars highest when the wind is against it, and only because a faithful string holds it to the earth — rootedness below, audacity above. Everything alive is quietly voting for altitude. Everything, that is, except its most gifted resident — who was engineered for it most of all. Remember your own architecture. The spine was our first cathedral, raised vertebra by vertebra over millennia, from crawl to stride to stargaze. The eyes were installed near the crown, not the heels; the anatomical memo could not be clearer. We look up to pray, up when we hope, up when we love. Rumi wondered why we crawl through life when we were born with wings; one suspects the answer is that crawling asks nothing of us, while wings come with a terrifying clause — use them.
Let us be precise, though, about what rising means, for it is not escape. Rising above the cauldron is not fleeing the kitchen; it is refusing to let the broth name you. It is the widow who plants a garden in her grief. It is the clerk who will not sign the crooked file though the crooked file pays better. It is the child in a torn uniform walking six kilometres to school, carrying the entire future of her village in a second-hand bag. It is choosing, in an age that monetises outrage, the unfashionable luxuries of forgiveness, patience, and awe. History confirms the pattern with almost monotonous kindness: after every darkness we brewed, something great happened. After every collapsed empire, a mother somewhere rebuild her world with two hands and a hymn. Falling is our habit; rising is our signature. We are, for all our sins, the species of the second chance.
And rising is contagious — this is its loveliest property. One person standing tall makes it easier for the next spine to remember itself. Courage, like fragrance, cannot be contained by the flower that made it. A single lamp does not curse the darkness of the whole room; it simply makes the darkness irrelevant, one radius at a time. Behaviour becomes practice, practice becomes culture, culture becomes civilisation. The road from one lifted chin to a lifted age is shorter than we think. It is walkable. It begins at the neck.
So rise. Rise, you magnificent mess of stardust and stubbornness. Rise above the grudge you have been marinating like a family heirloom. Rise above the pettiness that fits so comfortably it feels like a personality. Rise above the cruelty you scroll past, the corruption you call “the system,” the cynicism you call “realism,” the smallness you call “just how I am.” Rise above the cauldron — not around it, not in polite denial of it, but clean above it, the way the lotus files its daily appeal against the mud and wins, every single morning, without a lawyer.
This life — improbable, unrepeatable, outrageously beautiful — was not bestowed upon us to be belittled in instalments. The stars paid for your bones in full. The least we owe them is posture.
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Charudutta Panigrahi is a thinker and an author. He is a lifelong seeker mapping the ascent of the human spirit through word and work.
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