I am sitting in a train early morning, sleepily contemplating the scenery outside whilst lazily flipping through my WhatsApp messages. I see the image of an ancient Indian sculpture, a Hoysala stone panel, probably from the twelfth century, in which a single continuous line loops and crosses and returns upon itself within a perfect circle, never breaking, never ending, with a figure at the centre that appears to be dancing. And just as suddenly the scene outside and the image of the sculpture fused. What follows is the result of that fusion.
Outside, the world was layering itself in the early light; rows of trees along the tracks, then concrete and steel, homes and settlements, factories still sleeping, fields brown and green in alternation, and beyond all of that the Western Ghats, standing as they have stood for two hundred and fifty million years, entirely indifferent to my schedule. Above them, the sky – part blue, part a white shade of grey where clouds had gathered without permission. All of it lit by the same unhurried sun.
What the fusion revealed, in that half-awake moment, was this: the hills and the clouds and the sleeping factory and the brown field were not separate things arranged near each other. They were one movement. And the Hoysala sculptor, eight hundred years ago, had known this spending years of a life encoding it into stone. One line. No beginning, no end. Everything connected to everything else, and at the centre, a figure that is either dancing or struggling, and the stone refuses to say which. Perhaps both. Perhaps that is precisely the point.
The window I was looking through was not just the glass. It was also me.
This is where I want to begin.
We arrive in the world without this problem.
The infant does not separate the warmth of a hand from the feeling of being held from the sound of a voice. It is all one thing; arriving, complete, undivided. There is no infant standing slightly to one side, observing the experience and taking notes. The infant is the experience, entirely, without remainder. This will not last as the very development that makes us human will introduce the split but for a brief window, the undivided state is simply what existence is.
Then something begins. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, we learn to split the world into the one who is looking and the things being looked at. This is not a mistake. It is how language works, how knowledge accumulates, how civilisations are built. You cannot design a bridge without separating the engineer from the river. You cannot cure a disease without separating the doctor from the patient long enough to diagnose.
The split is necessary. It is also, if we are not careful, the source of much of what goes wrong between us in our most intimate relationships, in our politics, and in our relationship with the natural world itself.
Consider a relationship. Any relationship, a marriage, a friendship, a conversation between a parent and a grown child. We believe we are talking to the person in front of us but we are not. We are talking to our model of that person assembled from history, expectation, the accumulated verdict of every previous encounter, and our own needs dressed up as observations. The model is detailed, convincing, and almost entirely a construction.
The person in front of us keeps trying to arrive. We keep greeting the model instead.
This is not cruelty. It is simply what the mind does when it is not paying full attention, it reaches for what it already knows rather than remaining open to what is actually present. The moments in a relationship that feel most alive are precisely the moments when this substitution fails. When something the other person does cannot be fitted into the model. When they surprise you so completely that the model falls away and you see, briefly, who is actually there.
Those moments are not sentimental. They are perceptual. Something has shifted in how you are seeing, not just in what you are seeing. And most of us, if we are honest, can count on one hand the number of times it has happened in even our closest relationships.
The same dynamic, scaled up, becomes politics.
A political identity is a model so complete, so load-bearing, so woven into a person’s sense of self, that to question it feels like an act of violence. The other side is not a group of people with a different analysis of the same reality. They are the enemy because the model requires an enemy to remain coherent. This is not peculiar to any ideology. It is the structural logic of identity once it hardens into certainty.
Two moments from the twentieth century illustrate what it looks like when that hardening briefly reverses. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years of imprisonment without the bitterness his captors had counted on and without which reconciliation would have been impossible. He had spent those years, by his own account, studying his enemy. Not to defeat them more effectively, but to understand them as people. When he walked out of Victor Verster Prison in 1990, he was not performing magnanimity. He had genuinely dissolved the category. What followed — the negotiated end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation process — was made possible not by superior strategy but by that prior act of perception. In Northern Ireland, similarly, what ended decades of sectarian killing was not a better argument but a series of back-channel conversations in which individuals on opposing sides encountered each other as people rather than positions. The Belfast Agreement was a legal instrument. What made it possible was something prior moments of recognition between human beings trained, for generations, not to see each other at all.
What Mandela and Belfast tell us is not that the categories disappear, they don’t, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. What they tell us is that there are moments when two people, or two communities, choose to reach past the category to what is underneath it. Not to abandon their position, but to perceive, however briefly, the human being holding the opposing one. That act of perception — direct, unmediated, prior to strategy — is what creates the opening that argument alone never can.
The question worth sitting with is not how we talk to each other better. It is how we learn to see each other more directly. Which suggests that the conditions for genuine dialogue are not primarily rhetorical. They are perceptual. The same thread runs through our relationship with the natural world and here the stakes are not merely relational but existential.
We did not set out to destroy nature. We destroyed our relationship with nature and the distinction matters enormously. It happened the moment the forest became a resource. The moment the river became a water supply. The moment the soil became agricultural land. Each naming was also a permission to extract, to manage, to optimise. And each was built on the same foundational move: the separation of the observer from the observed, taken so far that the observer forgot he was ever inside it.
Sustainability as currently practised has not undone this move. It has made it more careful. We count carbon credits and price ecosystem services, necessary work, but still conducted from the position of the manager rather than the member. The Ghats outside my window do not know they are the Ghats. The morning sun is not performing illumination for our benefit. They were always complete. The question sustainability has not yet learned to ask is not how much we can take without breaking the system but what kind of relationship with the natural world would make that question feel as strange as asking how much you can take from a person you love before they stop loving you back.
Bring this into the workplace where most adults spend the majority of their waking hours and the picture is equally stark, if less obviously so. The modern organisation is built on the divided mind. Role, hierarchy, deliverable, performance review, incentive structure, every element is a category, and every category creates distance. Distance from the experience of the work. Distance from the actual presence of the people doing it alongside you. Distance from any honest question about why any of it matters. The result is not malice. It is a kind of acquired numbness, the slow erosion of presence, because the structure rewards outputs and cannot measure aliveness.
I know this not as abstraction but from the inside.
In 1993, I was given six days to prepare a World Bank grant application for the reconstruction of Latur, a city in Maharashtra just destroyed by one of India’s most devastating earthquakes. Three hundred million dollars. Cabinet approval required in six days.
The first thing worth noting is that Latur was not on a fault line. It was classified as a non-earthquake region. Every geological category said this could not happen here. Nature, as always, was indifferent to the categories. The classification existed in human minds. The devastation existed in the ground.
We worked around the clock. Every resource, every person, every data point was made available. Hierarchy existed on paper and became entirely irrelevant in practice. There was only the work, the deadline, and the absolute clarity of what was needed. We finished the fourteen-hundred-page document at five in the morning, four hours before the Cabinet meeting.
Then something happened that I have never forgotten.
The Principal Secretary Finance who had asked us to lead the preparation of the application had wisely stayed away, keeping out of our hair while we worked round the clock. Pressure cooker situations are rarely conducive to fractured leadership. But as if in sync, he kept pace, did not sleep through those days and nights, constantly monitored progress, and intervened seamlessly wherever and whenever necessary. Nevertheless, he must have been terrified the application would not be ready in time for the Cabinet meeting. These kinds of efforts always go down to the wire.
And so it was that we missed our deadline of 5 pm on the previous day and completed the application at 5 am the morning of the Cabinet meeting. With barely four hours to go, I felt this terribly depressing sense of having let the team down; all our heroic effort in waste. I was aware that some 200 copies of the Report had to be made and each of the copies for the Ministers had to be bound in leather covers embossed in the State Government’s seal. It was with the deepest sense of foreboding that I called the Finance Secretary. He picked it up on the first ring. “ Sir the Report is ready”.
I then heard six words words that were seared in my brain ever since. “Relax. Now it is my turn.” And then he put the phone down.
I sat on the couch, exhausted, still turning the document over in my mind, when I heard it. A growing sound from outside. Voices. Movement. At five thirty in the morning, the courtyard was filling with people. The Finance Secretary and his staff were distributing the single existing copy of the document — fifty pages at a time — to people who were running off into the dark with them. No master list. No record of who had taken what. No supervisor assigned to each group. Just over forty people, arriving in the dark, taking what was handed to them, and disappearing.
Over two hundred copies had to be made by nine thirty. Those placed before each Cabinet Minister had to be bound in leather and embossed with the official seal.
By seven thirty, they were back. Every copy. Perfectly bound. Leather covers. Embossed seals. Not one missing page, not one out of sequence, all two hundred copies, by people working in the predawn dark with no checklist, no oversight, no one measuring their contribution.
What those forty people did that morning was not efficient execution. It was something rarer. They became, briefly, one movement like the hills and the fields outside my train window. No gap between understanding and action. No model intervening between seeing and doing. The apparatus had dissolved entirely. There was only what was needed, and people equal to it.
This is what every institution we have ever built is secretly trying to produce — and almost systematically prevents. The school that teaches children their category. The workplace that assigns them their role. The political system that hands them their enemy. Layer by layer, the apparatus accumulates — and the courtyard at five thirty in the morning becomes something we call exceptional, miraculous, once in a career. It is none of those things. It is what we are capable of when the constructions fall away. The apparatus is the imposition. The courtyard is closer to the truth.
None of this is an argument for dismantling institutions. Organisations, categories, and roles exist because coordination at scale requires them. The point is not to abolish the structure but to hold it more lightly — to remain aware that the map is not the territory, that the model is not the person, that the category is not the forest.
That awareness cannot be manufactured or installed like software. But it can be cultivated in the quality of attention we bring to a conversation, in the willingness to stay with a question rather than reaching immediately for an answer, in the capacity to be surprised rather than merely confirmed.
The figure at the centre of that panel is still dancing. What the stone is asking is not whether we can see the line. We can all see the line. It is asking whether we can feel that we are part of it.