I spent most of my school years in Rishi Valley, a boarding school founded on the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti. He believed that the divisions we erect between ourselves and the world, between ourselves and each other, are the root source of human suffering. I was too young then to fully grasp what that meant. Decades later, having studied and worked across several geographies, having met and interacted with people from every conceivable walk of life, the truth of Jiddu’s insight has come home to roost. There is a small grocery store in my neighbourhood run by a deeply devout Muslim family. Next door is a Hindu temple. Every Diwali, the store puts out a small diya at the entrance — placed, I have noticed, by the grandmother, who does it without ceremony, the way you do something that has simply become part of who you are. Every Eid, the temple committee sends over a tray of sweets, carried across by one of the younger sons, who leaves it at the counter and exchanges a few words before heading back. Neither family has resolved their theological differences. Neither has tried to. And yet, something quietly civilised happens between them year after year. That small, unremarkable exchange may be one of the most important things happening in the world right now. Differences side stepped for a richer human relation.
Think about your own social circle for a moment. When did you last have a sustained, genuinely curious conversation with someone whose politics, faith, or worldview sits opposite yours? We live in algorithmically curated bubbles. WhatsApp groups have been known to have been fractured over politics. We are sorted by ideology as much as by income. The result is that irreconcilable differences, which have always existed, now have no buffers.
Krishnamurti would have had a precise word for what is happening. He would have said that the very act of labelling — Muslim, Hindu, liberal, conservative, victim, criminal — is where violence begins. That every ideology, including the ideology of tolerance, can become a prison if it substitutes for direct, unmediated encounter with another human being. The label is never the person. The map is never the territory. I did not understand this as a schoolboy. But I did understand it one night many years later, on a street I should not have been walking alone past midnight.
A man stepped out of the shadows and told me to empty my pockets. I complied. As my belongings came out, he noticed a small gift-wrapped box. He asked what it was. I told him it was a birthday present for my daughter, who was turning five. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said he had a five-year-old daughter too, and that he would very much like to give her a gift like that someday. And then something happened that I have never been able to fully explain. He gave me back everything. And then he said he would walk me to my place of residence a couple of blocks away, because there were others further along. We walked. I do not remember everything we spoke about. What I remember is this: somewhere in those few minutes, I had stopped thinking of him as a mugger. And he had stopped thinking of me as a victim. We were, briefly and absurdly and against all the logic of that night, just two fathers. Krishnamurti would not have been surprised. He had been saying it for decades: see the person before you have decided what they represent.
What is remarkable, and what the noise of our current moment obscures, is that every great civilisation, without exception, arrived at the same essential insight. Not the same theology. Not the same god. But the same stubborn moral instruction: see the other as yourself.
The Rigveda declares: Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti — “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.” The Quran, in Surah Al-Hujurat, reminds believers: “O mankind, We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” Not to agree. Not to convert. To know. The Bible, in Romans, counsels: “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” The Talmud states: “Whoever saves a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved an entire world.” One soul. One world. The arithmetic of Jewish ethical thought refuses to let the individual disappear into the collective, or into the enemy. The Torah goes further still: “Love your neighbour as yourself” — a commandment so radical that Rabbi Akiva called it the entire Torah’s great principle, everything else mere commentary. The Buddha, in the Dhammapada, taught: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred. It is appeased by love alone. This is an eternal law.” Not a counsel of weakness — the Buddha had seen enough of human cruelty to know what he was saying. That the cycle of dehumanisation, once begun, has no natural end except exhaustion or annihilation. Only a different logic can interrupt it.
It is worth pausing longest on Mahavira, the great Jain tirthankara, because what he offered the world was not merely an ethical instruction but an epistemological one. He gave us Ahimsa — non-violence — as the highest moral principle, and paired it with Anekāntavāda: the doctrine of many-sidedness, the formal philosophical insistence that truth is not the possession of any single perspective. Every viewpoint captures something real. No viewpoint captures everything. A man who believes he holds the complete truth is not enlightened but blinded — by the very certainty he mistakes for clarity. It is perhaps the most sophisticated response to fanaticism ever formulated, and it was articulated twenty-five centuries ago in the plains of Bihar. What makes it remarkable is not just its content but its structure: it does not argue against your truth. It argues against the idea that your truth is the only one. That is a different, and far more difficult, thing to refute.
These are not peripheral verses plucked for comfort. They sit at the ethical core of civilisations that developed in isolation from one another — across mountain ranges, oceans, and millennia — and arrived, independently, at the same conclusion. That is not coincidence. That is something closer to the grain of the universe.
And yet each tradition has also, in its history, used its truth to justify the destruction of another’s. This must be said plainly, because without it the argument becomes sentimental and the counter-argument wins by default.
The contact between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda was intimate and centuries-old. They shared language, land, intermarriage, and in many villages the same church pews. None of it was enough. Within a hundred days in 1994, neighbours murdered neighbours with machetes, and clergy in some cases locked their congregations inside churches before the killing began. In Bosnia, people who had shared apartment buildings, schools and wedding parties for a generation found, with terrifying speed, that those relationships dissolved the moment the political temperature crossed a certain threshold. In both cases, proximity had not been enough. What was missing was not contact but the institutional architecture — the laws, the leaders, the shared civic language — that gives contact its moral weight and its protection when things go wrong. The grocery store and the temple survive not only because two families are decent people, but because they exist within a society that still, however imperfectly, provides a floor beneath them. When that floor is removed — by demagogues, by state-sanctioned hatred, by the deliberate burning of the institutions that hold difference together — the flower festival is not enough. The fire goes out.
What distinguishes societies that survive their conflicts is therefore not the absence of irreconcilable difference. It is the presence of enough shared moral floor — enough common humanity felt in the body, not merely professed in the mind — kept in place by structures that must be actively defended, not passively inherited. This is the argument for pluralism not as sentiment, but as architecture. It requires maintenance. It requires courage. And it begins, always, at the human level — because the institutions are only ever as strong as the relationships they are built to protect.
India’s tribal traditions understood the human level instinctively, in ways that text-based civilisations often forgot. The Gondi people of central India practise Persa Pen — a cosmology in which the divine is not a singular authority to be obeyed but a living, plural presence distributed through nature, community, and relationship. Conflict resolution in Gondi tradition happens not through argument about who is right, but through collective ritual — sitting together, sharing food, invoking common ancestors. The goal is not verdict but restoration of relation.
The Santhals of Jharkhand hold a tradition called Baha — the flower festival — where the entire community gathers to celebrate the first blossoms of spring, regardless of internal dispute. Differences are not erased. They are temporarily subordinated to something held in common: the fact of being alive together, in the same forest, under the same sky.
These are not primitive workarounds. They are sophisticated solutions to the problem that philosophy alone cannot solve — that truth claims argued in the head do not automatically produce peace felt in the body. And they deserve to be named here not as footnotes to the great scriptural traditions but as their predecessors. The Gondi elder said it around the fire before any of it was written down.
The psychologist Gordon Allport found, after decades of research, that what reduces prejudice is not education or awareness campaigns alone. It is contact — actual, sustained, cooperative contact between different groups working toward a common goal. Not a panel. A task. Not tolerance as a stated value, but proximity as a lived practice. Critically, his research also showed what happens in its absence: that isolation does not merely fail to reduce prejudice, it actively deepens it. The less we encounter each other in unscripted, human ways, the more completely we are available to be shaped by whoever controls the script. The algorithm is not neutral. It is, in effect, the systematic removal of the flower festival.
India still has this in ways we dangerously undervalue. The shared festival calendar. The pilgrimage. The cricket match that stops a city. These are not merely cultural traditions — they are civilisational load-bearing structures. When you have danced the garba with your neighbour, it becomes harder to fully dehumanise them the next time your truths collide. This is not naivety. It is contact theory, practised for centuries before the term existed.
Krishnamurti said it differently, as he always did: “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” To see the other, truly see them, before you have decided what they represent. It was what the man on that midnight street did, without knowing he was doing it. He saw a father before he saw a target. It cost him nothing he could not afford to lose, and it changed, for a few minutes at least, everything between us.
In all my years, across all those interactions, across every extreme of human experience, I never once met a person who, seen closely enough, was only what their label said they were. Not the politician. Not the ideologue. Not even, God help us, the truly wicked — in whom, if you looked long enough, you could find the precise wound that made them so. That is not a counsel of naivety. It is a counsel to perceive.
The enemy of coexistence is not difference. It is the distance that allows difference to become abstraction — and abstraction to become acceptable grounds for erasure. The most subversive act available to any one of us is therefore simple, and daily, and hard: stay in genuine relationship with someone whose truth differs from yours. Resist the algorithm’s invitation to caricature. Remain present. Remain curious. Bring no unnecessary war.
The Rigveda said it. The Talmud said it. The Buddha said it. Mahavira said it. Confucius said it. The Gondi elder said it around a fire before any of them wrote it down.
The ocean doesn’t ask the rivers their names.
Every Diwali, a grandmother places a small diya at a grocery store entrance, without ceremony, the way you do something that has simply become part of who you are. Every Eid, a young man carries a tray of sweets across a threshold and exchanges a few words before heading back. Neither family has solved theology. Neither has tried. They have done something harder and more necessary: they have remained, year after year, genuinely present to each other. The floor holds because they choose, daily, to stand on it together.
That, in the end, may be the most hopeful – and the most urgent – thing I know.